Death sucks

In her last two years, Grandma looked like a caricature of a creepy old woman. She had one tooth, and that was in her bottom jaw, and often hidden by her tongue hanging from her mouth. Her face draped over facial her bones like a plastic grocery sack, and her gray hair matted around her head in thin, sweaty ringlets. Only her blue eyes, which she passed down to me, were recognizable.

When I entered the funeral home on Friday, though, it was only the eyes that were not recognizable. Incredibly, they had managed to make Grandma look like she did three years ago, when her disease had only made her a little goofy and funny. That was the time when we could still bring her to the store, where she would fawn over babies and talk to everyone as if they were her friend. That was before the time when she started flushing everything down the toilet, from popcorn to candles to, much more tragically, her wedding ring, old photos of her family, and her dentures. And long before the last two years, when she struggled to keep her eyes open when she was on her meds, or before she sat - angry, sad, stubborn, unconsollable, uncommunative - in a wheelchair for twenty hours a day.

Her life ended sadly, but she was a strong woman until the end. The services, which she planned and paid for herself ten years ago unbeknowst to her family, were really nice. Nothing she planned could be any different. After the initial shock and sadness of seeing her laying in her casket, it was clear that she looked peaceful. Grandpa, fifteen years earlier, died suddenly, and he looked like it at his funeral. The paleness of his skin, such a contrast with his warm red hue it had in his life, still reverbates in my mind. Grandma, on the hand, ironically looked healthier in death than in the last two years of her life. She looked more like the Grandma I remembered, who cooked the best gulumpki in the world and took us on the tilt-a-whirl at the State Fair until she vomitted.

Visitation was somber, but not without humor. We remembered old funny stories and jokes about Grandma, looked at photos, and hugged each other a lot. I was hoping some of her old friends would come, but she'd outlived nearly all of them. She was "only" 81 when she passed, but had married a man fifteen years her senior, so most of her friends were older, and almost all are now dead. So it was mostly family, with a few friends scattered in. I don't see my family much, but it was heartening to be with my cousins, to cry with them and hug them and remember a woman who was an indomitable force throughout my youth and early adulthood.

Being a teacher, I'm the closest one my family has to a public speaker, and I was the only one to speak up during the Rosary ceremony with the nun at the visitation. My voice cracked as I talked about my wonderful granmother who played such an active role in my life, how she let us help her cook, garden, build things, do her crafts, and how she attended every baseball and softball game we played. I was later asked to do the reading at the funeral, and we chose a couple of her favorite passages from the Bible and I practiced them so I wouldn't screw them up.

I didn't cry until my sister, who was closest to Grandma, who had a bouqet in her casket saying "From your special granddaughter, ________", looked at me, suddenly sobbing, and told me that Dad had his sunglasses on. He was crying. My dad, the staunch retired police officer, was crying. My mom was, too. Then they sang "On Eagle's Wings," mine and Grandma's favorite church song, and I started weeping along with my family. Later, I was a pallbearer with my cousins while the church sang "How Great Thou Art," perhaps the most wrenchingly beautiful song ever, and I weeped along with my cousins - all older than me, a cop, a Ford engineer, another cop - for Grandma, so much so that the sun stung my eyes when we carried her outside to the hearse.

I felt good after the graveyard ceremony, even in the 100-degree heat. As we said many times to make ourselves feel better, she could have lingered for a long time - Ronald Reagan lived to be 93 with Alzheimer's, for example - and now she was where it was clear she had wanted to be for the last several years. With Grandpa. As I mentioned in my last entry, I felt like she waited for me to say goodbye to die; she smiled at me on Saturday and squeezed my hand like she knew me (of which I have no doubt). It couldn't have been any better under the circumstances.

Still, though, I've barely slept in the last four days. As soon as whatever house I've been sleeping in - maybe my parents', maybe my uncle's, maybe my cousin's - got dim, I'm just left alone with my thoughts about her, together with an overwhelming sadness. This great woman is someone who very well probably should have died two years ago. Yet my heart is heavy with grief. It doesn't make the best of sense - she's at peace now, after all - but that doesn't mean the sadness is not one of the strongest I've felt in my life. It's clinging to me, an angry fat cat sitting on my chest, its untrimmed claws poking into my thorax and sternum. Breathing feels ponderous, and the lump in my throat has grown in size since I heard the news on Friday. All this for a woman who did everything expected of her in life, who lived 81 years of life to the fullest, who lived a life long enough and filled enough to keep most folks on this earth happy. And now she's gone, and despite some logical fallacies, I'm weighed down with a multiplying grief and pain.

I guess all I'm trying to say is that death sucks.

I'll be better soon.