Where I’m @

20020325

Third and final day of the funeral saga
Of course, we’re eliding the ten hours of driving in between the funeral service and the interment in Virginia. Though she lived in Massachusetts at the time of her death, the burial was in Virginia because there’s a V.A. cemetery there. Dad being a former Marine and both my parents having made it clear since I can remember that their funerals were to be as inexpensive as the state and the funeral industry would allow, it only made sense. In addition, there’s a sort of geopoetical niceness to it, in that she was raised in the South and never really became a Yankee despite growing to very much enjoy living in Massachusetts. That doesn’t account for the fact that my dad will be buried there, except that he would do anything for her.

As expected, perhaps, the interment service in Virginia was quite brief. We probably spent more time waiting around than attending the service. And it was conducted by a stranger, the Protestant minister for the Quantico Marine base or something like that. Nice enough man, but a stranger is a stranger. He just read from what looked to be the Book of Common Prayer, which I believe is only Episcopal. Perhaps the military chaplains have a similar book-form order of worship. Standard readings for anyone who’s ever seen a Protestant funeral in a movie or on television. At least, I think so, because I don’t entirely remember what was read. Something from the Psalms and something from a Gospel (or two) and something from the Pauline Epistles, probably, because that is what gets read at just about every Protestant service of any kind.

The women who took a great deal of social (and in some cases more than that) care of Mom asked me to take down a flower from the arrangement they provided for the service in Massachusetts and place it where appropriate. But this V.A. cemetery, and perhaps all, doesn’t hold graveside ceremonies because they try to be space-efficient and will dig ten holes if they have ten burials on a day. Naturally, who wants to bury their loved one next to four or five or ten other gaping maws of Death? So I placed the clipping on the casket as it stood in the good-enough-for-government shelter with the flies buzzing overhead under the plexiglass skylight and felt very odd, since nobody else was doing similar and I knew nobody else would. Yet again, some comforting attendees. Mom was always close with some of her cousins, and a few of them who live in the Washington, D.C. metro area showed up. Her closest adult friend came, as did her husband (a former Marine like my dad), a Marine who we knew in the late 70s and who had only found out that morning, friends and coworkers of my sister and brother-in-law, and one of Mom’s aunts.

If I havent’t said it before, how biologically unjust is it that my mom gets to die but her parents are alive, her in-laws are alive, her father’s two siblings are alive, fer cryin’ out loud? I’m not really angry at God, or anything trite like that (tangent: it’s always seemed odd to me that people in movies and on TV have some great rage against God when something bad happens, like we have any flippin’ clue what really goes on with the Creator), but when you’re raised to see things in a judgmental light, things that are disagreeable get labeled Wrong. And I must say, this is highly disagreeable.

20020319

Second day of the funeral saga
That’s when the fun really began. Day two was the actual funeral service at my parents’ church in their town. Though they’re not holy rollers by any stretch of the imagination, they’ve been very active in the management of the church and my mom was even on the committee that hired the new ministers, so she was well known and well liked.

A brief digression: When Mom was first diagnosed with ALS, I rented a car and drove up to see them. I was a perfect stalwart manly man until the time came to leave and I tried get out what I had thought to say. I got about halfway through my short elucidation of the abhaya mudra, the hand sign that the Buddha made when he returned from obtaining enlightement (I’m broad-brushing here) and broke out crying. Which was nothing compared to having to pull off the highway twice on the way to Brooklyn because I couldn’t see through the tears. Both times I was trying to sing along with a Peter Gabriel tape, the latter time with “Wallflower”, which fits very closely the situation of an ALS patient, though I believe the song is more about a mentally ill person.

So I was fine (composed, at least) for seeing my dead mother, for seeing my grieving family, for all of that, but when we started to sing one of the hymns that Mom had chosen for the service I just lost it. Racking, gut-wrenching sobs. It was good to feel the SO’s arm around my shoulders.

But that’s what it’s about, catharsis, isn’t it? The Greeks knew where it was at. My sister and I said a few words, which was hard in its own way, but doable. I’ve always been good at public speaking, without either the terror or the over-eagerness most people have, so this was only difficult in the subject matter. Also, during my words, I was strengthened by seeing people I cared about very much in the congregation.

So catharsis works — I was able to struggle through the last hymn, one about the end of the battle against sickness and death. Seeing the casket put into the hearse must have been some sort of finality, though, because I let go again on my aunt and my other aunt and my uncle and a friend who was in a similar situation during our time in college.

Then the cocktail party thing again. And once again, some welcome and unexpected guests, most notably my mother’s best friend from elementary school and high school, the one she borrowed a parent’s car with when they were 12. She seemed like someone my mother would have liked, but it’s a shame that I never got to see them together.

20020318

First day of the funeral saga
Visiting hours were on Monday, from 4 pm to 7 pm. The funeral director of the only funeral home in town informed us that the old-school Yankee hours were 2–4 pm followed by 7–9 pm, for two days. We opted for less time, on one day only, but spanning the times when day people could come by and when evening people could come by. The immediate family went over at 3ish so that those of us who wanted to see her could. Initially, I figured that I would go in with the others, just as support for them if they wanted it, but when we got there, I really didn’t want to see her any more. Not that the physical aspect bothered me, but something made me reluctant. Perhaps it’s not articulable.

We met and greeted for three hours, some of which was nice. A fraternity brother of my dad’s showed up from Indiana, unsuspected. The mother of my last remaining friend from my second high school came by unexpectedly (as did said last remaining friend). Many people who worked with either my mom or my dad paid a visit, some up from Providence or out from Boston. But standing for most of three hours left something to be desired.

Wish I’d had more comfortable shoes.

20020315

We drove back to Brooklyn yesterday from Virginia, where the interment was, and it feels like we've been at a morbid cocktail party for almost a week. The big white elephant in the room was talked about some, but not as much as would probably have been most helpful.
It was a good diversion to watch the NCAA basketball tournament on television. Mush for the mind for the most part, though some of the games were pretty good. Story of the first round, I guess. Today is clean-up-the-house day and go-to-the-gym day and think-about-how-to-blog-this-all day.

20020309

Those squeamish about death should move on.
Finally got to see her for what may truly be the last time. (Dad said a couple times over the last few months that I should make sure to say anything I had to say because I might not get to see her again, but he always seemed to me to be acting a bit like an alarmist. Later I realized that he was, in his own way, expressing that he hoped it would be soon. [Those of you who have had a loved one suffer for a long illness know how that’s not a bad thing, the rest of you will have to take my word for it.] So far I haven’t regretted not coming up with something lofty and serious and emotional to say, and I hope I won’t ever.) I and the SO got a special private "viewing" at the funeral home today, and it was a bit of a letdown. See, I'm a fairly spiritual person — more specifically a Christian spiritual person, but I'm not too exclusive about it — and I know that her body was just a container, and a highly faulty one at that. But something made me need to see her one last time, and I didn’t want to wait until Monday and the visiting hours at the funeral home, when immediate family was going to get a chance, if they so desired. (No open-casket service for us, thank you very much. I know there are some good arguments for it, but it’s important to us not to.)

Wax. That’s pretty much what she is now. Cold. Hard. Waxy. Very much not alive. I’ll be honest: I’ve never seen a dead person before. Nobody in the proximate family has died. Somehow, at thirty years of age, I have four living original grandparents, in addition to all the others who one expects to still be alive, cousins and uncles and aunts. So I also partly wanted to see her and touch her and find out what a dead person was like. Not so scary, really. Certainly, it’s not a sensation I want to experience every day, but it’s also not something to make me weep and wail and rend my garments. Though I feel a pang of regret that other people aren’t going to get to see her. It’s going to be pretty easy for me to have her put in the ground on Thursday, because anything about this person that I really care about it gone. Yes, if it were my relative at that Georgia crematory, I’d be pretty steamed, but really, she’s elsewhere.

They put a touch of weight on her in the embalming process, which irks me a bit. But that’s what they do, and who’s going to fight with them to make her look “bad”? So it was good to see her in that indeed it is a good way of separating. Got to say good-bye, got to be convinced that she really is dead, that she’s not just gone somewhere for a long time, like some children are unfortunately told.
Yet I’m not wholly satisfied because it wasn’t really her that I saw. It was some wax statue that they have substituted for her. (I know now how conspiracy theorists live, because I have now experienced my mind contradicting my senses.) I could go on, and you’ll probably see much more in this space about it, but it’s time for bed. Twelve people at the house today, probably nearly thirty tomorrow, including a grandfather nearly in pieces.

20020308

Mom died today, sometime around 3 pm. They say she was asking about me, but somehow that doesn't make me feel any better. I’ve never done this before, so I was surprised when we got up here and her body, which had become such a prison for her mind and spirit, was already at the funeral home. We got here too late to go there, so we’ll have to go there tomorrow. So ends phase one. Now we begin phase two. Good luck to us all.

20020307

It’s not often the gods of Science are in error, at least not publicly. But now, certain men of learning are turning a bright shade of . . . mint green. Yes, it appears that a bug in their software program led a team working under the name of the Australian 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey at the Anglo-Australian Observatory in New South Wales, Australia, to declare that the color of the universe was good-enough-for-government green. Now, however, the color has become beige. Or maybe off-white. Or maybe cream. Or alabaster. Or the next shade of a linen shirt at J. Crew.
Stay tuned. Tomorrow, it could be puce!

20020306

This site’s real estate on WebNouveau, a compendium of CSS-based sites, got a spiffing up recently. Now we are even being allowed our choice of colors and some limited styling. The name needed changing, so it’s hoped that the changes submitted make it through. Triptronix is in some decent company, popping up on (currently) the same page as none other than Joe Chellman, MSchindler, Molly Holzschlag, Charlotte Gray (in part, a Zeldman project), elegant hack, Webdesign-l, Neuralust and placenamehere, Metagrrl, Noah Grey, xblog, Bluishorange, and, wonder of wonders, The International Herald Tribune, which has one of the most discussed layouts on Webdesign-l around.

Namedropping does not constitute a content endorsement, of course.

Some overdue additions to the Overheard page are up.