It's been an exhausting week. My maternal grandmother died last Friday night due to cancer. My mom flew in from Sydney last Sunday, and then she and I flew up to Ohio on Tuesday for the funeral - on puddle jumpers no less. We came back the same day, and Mom flew back to Sydney on Thursday. It all caught up with me Thursday afternoon, and I ended up working from home on Friday. I was literally in bed with a laptop.
It was a three-hour drive from the airport to the funeral home, though there were some nice stretches of Ohio countryside to see, and my cousin and her husband provided much-needed comic relief. We looked at their wedding photos and asked after their kids, and careers, and kept the rest of the family apprised, via mobile phone, of our travel progress.
Graysville, Ohio is about as small-town America as you can get, but I kind of liked it. Everything looked old and felt old and smelled old - buildings, roads, traffic lights, cars.
Everything went as well as we could have hoped for. We saw a ton of family that we hadn't seen in a long time, and some that we'd never met, like my uncle's kids, one of whom needed her hair re-done, so Mom did a French braid for her, while I listened to her talk about the science projects she had done in school this year (she's going into fifth grade next year).
Mom held up well, and my grandmother's sisters were glad to see her. It was like seeing shadows of my grandmother whenever one of them walked through the door. Aunt Betty had navy blue eyebrows to match her blue outfit, and Aunt Jeannie was decked out in a rusty orange shiny shirt, brown pants, funky sandals, and a Katharine Hepburn head bobble.
For 71, my grandmother looked remarkably well. Hardly any wrinkles and very smooth skin (I remember that she drank a lot of water). She was in a beautiful white crocheted shawl. I think she made it herself. Mom was on her knees crying in front of the casket for a good ten minutes - cathartic release, I'd say. I stood over her and the casket, passed tissues to Mom, and let myself feel guilty about not feeling anything. I hadn't seen my grandmother in more than 20 years due to a stunningly stupid family argument that I had no part of (I was about 10 when it happened), but which I was affected by. The argument was mostly my grandfather's doing, and my grandmother had little say in its results, or in much of anything from what I've heard, because my grandfather was always the one in charge.
The funeral director and his son were very kind and quiet spoken, which are probably typical characteristics of funeral people.
My grandfather gave me a locket that my grandmother wanted me to have, with a gruff "here, this is for you." After 20-some years, that's all he seemed to want to say to me. I had hoped for more - a "glad you're here," or "how are you?" or "I've missed you." I wouldn't have known what to say in return, so it's probably just as well. Mom noticed that he was wearing the same suit that he had worn at my parents' wedding 32 years ago. It was the only one he'd ever had tailor-made, and he was always proud of it.
The flight back home was very bumpy and uncomfortable, all the moreso in such a small plane. Mom and I slumped in our seats, held hands, and tried to come up with conversation topics to take our minds off the turbulence. I will say that seeing the lightening flash right in the clouds was pretty scarily spectacular.
Once back at BWI, we had a hell of a time trying to get to the carpark. We could see it from the windows but couldn't figure out how to get to it. We ended up trudging from one end of the airport to the other, stopping to rest and laugh at how ridiculously stressful and silly the whole day was.
We made it home by around midnight. I fell asleep on the couch in my suit, and Mom ended up sleeping until about 2 pm the next day. I ordered some takeout Chinese food for lunch, and got her up and eating. She was alarmed that she'd slept for so long.
I had no energy or heart to do much of anything this weekend. I stayed in bed, and only exerted myself to use the bathroom, change the DVD, and lift a book and look into it for awhile. I'm only at the computer so that I can say that I did sit upright at some point in the past two days.
I've got to hand it to my mom - to fly all the way from Australia to say goodbye to a woman who hadn't shown her much kindness or attention for 20 years and to face a father who had done far worse is really saying something: it was her mother, no matter what, and Mom didn't want to ever regret not making the effort. I'm pretty lucky to have a mom like that.
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