Today was the first Canada Day since my grandmother died. Her birthday was July 1, so my mom always threw a Canada Day barbeque/birthday/pool party. It made my grandmother happy. Some years were good; others boring. I enjoyed being at concerts (as a teen) and StanFest (as a young married) instead of going. One more afternoon of small talk and potato salad, with a sheet cake at the end of it. Usually by the time that everybody was ready for fireworks, I was more than ready for some alone time.

This year I went to the party without my husband, without my boyfriend, without the birthday girl. It was pretty good, but every once in awhile I would look at the maple leaves and hit a pocket of sadness. The worst part was the birthday cake, which my grandfather brought. After we sang and all blew it out, I looked up to see him crying.

This spring has been a hard one for my garden. Flowers are late in appearing, seeds are hesitant to germinate. I have two rose bushes in my front garden that my grandmother planted, one on either side of the path going to my door. I've been cheering on the yellow bush, as it was choked in morning glories last year and never bloomed, and it's been doing well. Last week I noticed that my other bush seemed to be blooming in two colours. Mason figured out that it was two bushes, and it was only this week that I realized that my grandmother planted a modern bush next to an old bush, and the old bush has just now come back.

It's funny. I didn't think it was going to hit me hard. I thought her influence on me was minimal. I think I'm coping well. And then I see a rose, and I know by colour and shape that it isn't one my grandmother would buy. I look at a cheap Canada Day flag and get a knot in my chest. I wish for cabbage rolls in the dead of winter. I miss her, and I never thought I would.

Labels: death, family

Waiting for my Flickr photos to upload. My internets have been spotty this week, so while I've been mostly homebound I've been thrown abruptly on my own resources in order to amuse myself. I barely remember what life was like in my home before hot & cold running webpages. It's...much less filled with trivia, for one thing.

Besides living it up like it was 1995, I've been recovering from a mercifully mild cold, babysitting Sage at irregular intervals, finishing up my report cards and generally trying to get on top of the backlog that formed during my grandmother's mourning. I haven't been able to make any troupe practices lately, although my Monday ATS class with Valizan, despite being in Oakville, has been 58 kinds of awesome. Not the least of why is because I'm carpooling with Jessamyn & Juuki, so there's a lot more time for gossip and tea than is usual at troupe practice.

Anyway. Despite the fact that report cards are one long haul away from completion and despite the fact that I lost a job opportunity and an elder on the same day, and despite the fact that exam season always makes me anxious, miserable, unhealthy, feral and desperate to run away to somewhere far from my perpetually snowed-in driveway, I'm cautiously optimistic for the end of the week. I'm not 100% sure what I'm basing that optimism on, but it's there. Maybe I'm just ready for the spring term, with its attendant rocketslide to June. Maybe I'm just glad that I can wear black out of choice, not social necessity.

I'm not going to do a blow-by-blow of the funeral. I was too out of it for much in the way of recording, anyway. I did a eulogy at the funeral, which seemed to be well-received, but it's like a 8-year-old's piano recital. You never know. Who's going to go up to you and say, "hey, that eulogy really blew. Sorry we asked you." I found myself much more comfortable with my grandmother's corpse than I was with her post-stroke state in the hospital, or maybe I just had three weeks of practice without her answering back and that made it easier. Blake has been handling it well, occasionally asking "when is GG coming back?" My glib answer ("when Jesus does, and that's not for a long time") feels shallow.

I didn't cry. I think most of the shock and guilt and panic all went out of me when I read that letter to her a few weeks ago. I started trembling half-way through the eulogy, but it wasn't a sentimental speech – I had to pause part way for the laughter to subside – and it didn't carry me into spasms of weeping. I still hear her voice in my head, and it makes me smile. It made me smile to see my family together, cracking jokes before the visitation. It made me smile to know exactly where we should have dinner before the visitation, because we'd gone there with her 4 years ago before another funeral. It made me smile to re-use my wedding program inserts, and force "And did these feet" on another unsuspecting group of people. I think it was a good funeral. I think she would have approved.

Labels: bat masterson, blake, dancing, death, family

Um.

My grandmother died on Wednesday. Mason's one-year-old son Sage is staying with us this weekend. I have about three days of marking to do, and I'm losing one tomorrow to child care. I'm sort of sick and have spent the day in my pjs.

Um. Yeah. Here's a eulogy.

I'm J's granddaughter. I teach highschool English, and one of the things I made my students practice is how to write a eulogy. Finding the right words to help us through bad moments is hard. But it's important. Eulogy means "praise," and so the words we're looking for are good words, words of praise to help us remember my grandmother. I wanted to share some of the words I'm going to use.

The first word I will use to remember my grandmother is glamour. Glamour is a really old word that was first used to describe the spells witches cast on their victims, and later became used to describe the magic power of beautiful, dressed-up women. Throughout my life, I always had two pictures of my grandmother: the ordinary, aging woman I saw frequently and the pint-sized beauty queen of the wartime era. My mother and I, heirs to her legacy, have not shown much of an interest in it. Neither of us even regularly wear make up, although we both know how to wield the business end of a mascara wand. But there was a direct effect on me at least, and this is the love of effect. In my twenties, when I started to go to goth clubs, I was inevitably asked two friendly questions. The first was where did you get your retro fishnets and the second was where did you get that colour of lipstick? You can probably guess the answer to both of those questions. I got them from my grandmother, the former beauty queen, who even in her later years knew exactly what would catch attention on a girl. And although she may not have enjoyed being there with me on those nights, I know that she would recognize the spirit that got me painted and dressed with all the glamour I could beg, borrow or own.

The second word that I will use to remember my grandmother is love. If you read obituaries, it seems like every person who dies was an incredibly loving family member, a good spouse, etc. I've been to shopping malls, so I doubt that we're all that good. But my grandmother knew love. She really did. She was the least sentimental person I've ever met – and I tend to make friends with unsentimental types – and she knew the difference between sentiment and love. Sentiment is fake greeting card poems and phony praise and pretend interest. Love is cans of food every visit. Love is warm sweaters every Christmas, in my favourite colour (black). Love is making sure that my son Blake had enough to drink at a restaurant, even if it meant emptying out the monkey dish and feeding him tiny creamers, one after another. Her love wasn't unconditional or even uncritical, but it was powerful. For someone who seemed to have her sense of sentiment surgically removed at birth, she was always full of the real stuff. I was reminded of this in the last few weeks, when I brought Blake to visit her in the hospital. Weakened by a massive stroke, she still found the will to follow his voice, to squeeze his hand, to watch him as he tried to steal her applesauce. I'm sure that all of us who were her children, her grandchildren, her nieces and her nephews were once the target of that strong love, even if we've forgotten what it was like.

The third word I will use to remember my grandmother is action. My grandmother, from her earliest days, was a woman of action. We were lucky to spend this past Christmas together at my house, and although we could tell that she wasn't feeling her best, she still came into the kitchen to peel Brussels sprouts with a butter knife until I insisted on getting a stool and reaching down the paring knife. Despite her advancing age, my grandmother has been right into my garden from the time we bought the house almost two years ago. I had little to no interest in gardening, but she and my mother knew that to waste this plot would be a crime, so they rolled up their sleeves and hoped for the best. This summer I finally figured out why anyone would want to spend so much time scrabbling in the dirt, and I have them to thank for it. There are bracelets that try to remind some of us WWJD? (What Would Jesus Do?). I don't really need one to remind me What J Would Do because it would be practical, energetic and to the point. I've even had moments when I had that conscious thought, such as when I was at a co-worker's house for a staff party. After driving back and forth for the better part of 15 minutes and using language unbecoming to myself and to Blake in the back seat, I finally found her driveway. But as soon as I parked, I started to worry about other people arriving after me. So I thought, What Would my Grandmother Do? Five minutes later I was blowing up balloons and tying them to a streetpost in front of the drive. I barely had to think about it because I knew what I should do right away. In the past few days, my mother and my uncles have said the same thing about her death: that as soon as they started to talk about nursing homes, she decided to get out while she could. It would be exactly like her if she did take action.

It's been a hard month for me. I know that's an understatement for many of us, but it has. One of the worst parts of this month has been the feeling that I wasted so many opportunities to be patient, to be sweet, to be funny when I was in the room with my grandmother. She had her stroke a week after everyone was at my house for Christmas dinner, so soon that I hadn't even cleaned up all of the gifts scattered around my livingroom. (No, I'm not the housekeeper she was, either.) Because I've known my grandmother all of my life, it was easy to believe she would always be there while I was alive. Because this was so sudden, it's easy to regret the good words not spoken. So that's why we're here. To share the good words.

Labels: death, family

I've been telling people about your stroke, and they all tell me the same thing: don't feel guilty; it's not your fault. But I do feel guilty - not responsible, I'm not deluded - but guilty for the way I felt before the stroke. How I resented your visits because I was afraid of what you would say or what you would ignore. Or who you would favour. I lost the trick of your approval, and I always wanted to figure out how to get it back. I wanted you to like me. I'm trying to be ok with you not liking me. I'm trying to just love you now, while you're here, and not be angry because I didn't make you happy. My friend Clarke, the priest who married me, once said: "Aleta, you can't like everybody and everybody can't like you." I used that to get me through teaching. Now I'm using it to get me through this week.

I know that you love my son, love him without reservation. You still look right at him as soon as he speaks, no matter where he is in the room. One of my friends told me that when your head comes round to watch him, that you might be mistaking him for one of your own sons or grandsons. That you may be traveling in time. I don't think so. I think that you love him still, that you know who he is, and that your love is stronger than this stroke that's pinned you to the bed.

I think you hate your daughter brushing your teeth and changing your diaper. I think it's hard for you to need these things done for you. I think you saw yourself as immortal. God knows, I did. This is why I can't stop feeling guilty. Mom knew your time was limited. She would make excuses for you left, right and centre. I had this immature conviction that you would never grow frail or sick or on the edge of death. I was so sure that the strength of your will would keep your body and soul together. I was so sure that you'd be chain smoking over my burial plot. I was so childish.

When I told people about you in the first few days after your stroke and they immediately told me they were sorry, I rushed to reassure them. It's okay, I would say, we're not close. I kept saying that. And I couldn't figure out why I would go into a mild panic attack when I tidied up and found the ornaments you'd brought for the tree still sitting in their bag a week after Christmas. I couldn't understand why just looking at the envelope where you'd placed 4 crisp five dollar bills for Blake's Christmas money made me want to cry. I would think back to Christmas Day and how weak you were then, and tell myself that I should have known something was up. It's taken me days, whole days, to realize how important you are to me. I didn't want you to be. I wanted to brush off the crisis. My mom did, too. But she didn't because she found a deep, uncomplicated love. I'm trying to find that love. It's hard, because in a lot of ways I try to be as tough as you. I try to pretend I don't feel anything. The two of us are such liars.

I'm sorry you had these strokes. I'm sorry that you're in this bed when you should be up and about and telling the nurses all about your sister and your greatgrandson. I'm sorry that I couldn't relax when you tried to give Blake everything he could possibly want in the Mandarin. I'm sorry I disappointed you. I'm not sorry that I can help my mom care for you. I'm not sorry to have this chance to tell you that I love you. And that I get the chance to tell you that I'm sorry.

Labels: death, family, threshold experiences

6 Degrees of Savage Garden, a collaborative entry written by Stacy, Javina & I in 2002.

More to come. It's been a long week.

Labels: dancing, death