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Monday, 14 December 2009 19:07My grandmother passed away today at about noon. It was, I am told, relatively painless, and since it came at the end of a long illness and my mother and grandfather were there with her, it could be worse.
A large part of me has been expecting this since Mom flew out Saturday morning, so it feels as if I did my preliminary mourning then (small bout of tears in the middle of a completely unrelated conversation). Now, I just feel kind of hollow, like there should be emotions there that aren't. I'll admit that I was never particularly close to my grandparents (my mother's parents; my father's had both died before I was born), but shouldn't I feel something?
Or maybe it's just that I've cried myself out over the last two years over the minor heartbreaks that come with depression, and I'm empty. Where do you buy refill emotions? Staples, next to the ink cartridges?
I realized, too, that almost all of the strong memories I have of my grandmother are stories I was told about her. I know she rode horses bareback before the war, and once went to the beach and made a bikini out of bandannas because she didn't have a swimsuit. I know that my grandfather went AWOL to marry her so she could get out of Europe after the war, and that while she told him he could divorce her once she was in Canada they just never got around to it. I know the stories of her inability to cook and the time she crammed half a dozen steaks into my mother's tiny med school freezer. But these aren't my memories, and I guess that just adds to the disconnect I'm feeling right now.
The funeral is on Friday (we're bending the three-day rule so that it's not on my brother's birthday) at the funeral plot on Long Island. I'm still taking the exam I have scheduled on Wednesday, because putting it off really isn't going to make that much of a difference, anyway. We're driving up to Frostbite Falls tomorrow to pick up my brother; exact arrangements to bring my mother and grandfather up to New York and for us to meet them are still up in the air. Shivah (kind of like a Jewish wake, except really not) will be at our house starting...after the ceremony, I suppose, but Jewish law doesn't really take interstate travel into account.
I guess that's it, then.
A large part of me has been expecting this since Mom flew out Saturday morning, so it feels as if I did my preliminary mourning then (small bout of tears in the middle of a completely unrelated conversation). Now, I just feel kind of hollow, like there should be emotions there that aren't. I'll admit that I was never particularly close to my grandparents (my mother's parents; my father's had both died before I was born), but shouldn't I feel something?
Or maybe it's just that I've cried myself out over the last two years over the minor heartbreaks that come with depression, and I'm empty. Where do you buy refill emotions? Staples, next to the ink cartridges?
I realized, too, that almost all of the strong memories I have of my grandmother are stories I was told about her. I know she rode horses bareback before the war, and once went to the beach and made a bikini out of bandannas because she didn't have a swimsuit. I know that my grandfather went AWOL to marry her so she could get out of Europe after the war, and that while she told him he could divorce her once she was in Canada they just never got around to it. I know the stories of her inability to cook and the time she crammed half a dozen steaks into my mother's tiny med school freezer. But these aren't my memories, and I guess that just adds to the disconnect I'm feeling right now.
The funeral is on Friday (we're bending the three-day rule so that it's not on my brother's birthday) at the funeral plot on Long Island. I'm still taking the exam I have scheduled on Wednesday, because putting it off really isn't going to make that much of a difference, anyway. We're driving up to Frostbite Falls tomorrow to pick up my brother; exact arrangements to bring my mother and grandfather up to New York and for us to meet them are still up in the air. Shivah (kind of like a Jewish wake, except really not) will be at our house starting...after the ceremony, I suppose, but Jewish law doesn't really take interstate travel into account.
I guess that's it, then.
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