Out of the way

My Granny died. I was on a rare holiday with my family, and Mum came in early in the morning to tell me. We gathered, my brothers and sister, my nephews, my mother and her cousin, and just sat a while, half a world away.

It wasn't a susprise or a shock. She had been sick, and waiting to die, living in a bed in my mother's house and looking out the window. I had talked to varius members of the family, and we knew she was dying. I think we even pretty much expected it to happen about when it did, while we were all away. (Nobody seems to die on me when I am around. I don't now why).

Having had several urgent trips to Australia for a funeral (it is a long long way, and arriving exhausted doesn't make a funeral any easier) I am glad that Granny's funeral is still a couple of weeks away. It is important for me to be there, and it is waiting in part until I definitely can. In a way it fees selfish. I am also glad, because Granny was the closest to me of my grandparents (as well as being the last, in the end, of the three that I knew). Some things just take time to deal with, and rushing them is more likely to lead me to just bury them inside than to facing up to the new realities.

Going through with a holiday (something I very rarely do, let alone with the family gathered), turning up to planned meetings, getting on with the work I had anticipated, while having in the back of my mind that Granny has gone, seems to make it easier to recognise as a fact than dropping everything and racing across the world to a ceremony that has become too familiar.

We don't seem to like the idea of death as a society. At least not of the peaceful, quiet death that will eventually come to us if we cheat all the other ways of passing for long enough. But it happens to all of us, to all of our friends and relations and acquaintances and enemies. Our lives are a tangle of relationships that is ever-changing, and sometimes the change is another person withdrawing forever from the endless formation and reformation of their part.

Ashes to ashes, they say. But when you can no longer really enjoy a 5-0 clean sweep of them, and your friends have moved on, it's probably time. The rest of us have other things to do first, but we'll all get there, and in the meantime you too are a part of us. So long as someone knows your name, you exist.

Bye bye Granny. I will come and see you soon, but you won't know it. Still, you can always drop in to visit my thoughts for a while and see what I am up to. Whatever you might say, I think you can understand it.