mort

Death is a funny thing. No living thing escapes it (unless you're talking about some species of prehistoric bacteria that was quasi-recently discovered in an ice chunk in the arctic -- my memory is foggy and details are sketchy though -- but as I recall it was a one-celled organism that had the astonishing ability to, for lack of a better scientific term, "put it self to sleep" for literally millennia without needing to absorb nutrients or water. Fucking crazy right? It woke back up when scientists found it. Imagine that -- an invincible, prehistoric creature that never needs to eat, sleep and can tolerate both arctic and inner volcano-like temperatures.)

Some see death coming much more clearly than others. It can happen instantly -- a car crash, heart attack, smoke inhalation from a fire -- but more often than not it's a process. Like all processes, there is an inevitable finality.

I've never felt so...oddly unattached to a death before. With a little more than a week before Christmas and I'm sitting here, for the first time ever, with no living grandparents. Although my grandmom (dad's side) had been the last living connection to two generations ago for me, I was never especially close with her. Honestly, neither my mom, brother nor I were. She was bi-polar, took a hodgepodge of medications that probably shouldn't have been mixed, lost her temper for no reason or little provocation, always wanted the spotlight, and never fully understood where my brother and I were coming from (the generational difference is partly to blame, but it was moreso her conscious decision to not keep up with the times). Now she's dead (something we've known was definitely going to happen for about 3 weeks now, but were relatively sure for about 2 months). Dementia took over and then it went downhill from there. By the end she wasn't eating any food or drinking any water. When she stopped eating we knew she'd be gone soon enough, but it's when she couldn't even take water in anymore that we knew it'd be a couple of days at most. For the past 6+ weeks she's been barely able to string together a cohesive sentence and her mind was always elsewhere.

At around 2:30 pm on Friday, December 17th she finally went. Her breathing slowed, went kind of sparatic for a bit, then eventually just stopped altogether. My dad was with her when it happened (down in Delaware) but the rest of us found out via cell phone.

As I mentioned before, I'm not torn up over this and I'm 99% sure I won't even shed a tear at the funeral. Even though I'd known her since birth, this death seems distant, but not in a denial sort of way. Unfortunately, the only sense of remorse I might feel will stem more from feeling sad for my dad rather than myself. Maybe, too, a little for the fact that I no longer have any grandparents left. But not for genuine sympathethic reasoning.

The funeral is December 23rd. I wonder what Christmas is going to be like.





In lighter news, I'll be in DC/Nova for New Year's Eve, the 1st, 2nd and part of the 3rd. Then on the 4th Larisa and I have tickets to see a live taping of The Daily Show in New York. Good times all around.

Let me know what your plans are for then, I'm trying to see everyone and drink a bit.