(no subject)

[kingtycoon]

so my telephone broke in a way that...  well it broke in a way that ten years ago you wouldn't notice - now it operates like an old timey telephone in that it rings and I answer it - and that is all.  I guess I could dial a number - if I knew anybodies.  Even my old folks don't have the same number.  I can call my old car dealership I guess - the one phone-number I always remember.  

It's been a weird year for phones.  It's been a weird year for a lot of things. 

I think.  I think that this week young Agatha will face death.  I think before the month is out her great-grandmother will die.  And that is very sad, and not at all sudden.  I always liked her - best of that branch of kind-of family.  Thelma.  They call her mother-  when her first grandchild came she said she was too young to be anyone's gramma - so she told her grandkids to call her mother.  So close to 90.  I liked her -  I mean she always got dressed up and put on her makeup or perfume or whathave you to meet me at the door - which was lovely.  I think I'll try and go and find out about it.

I was thinking about what I might tell young Agatha about these things.  But I don't know.  I thought about what I think about death.  At first I remembered that I didn't know my grandfathers - they both died in my memory.  My grandmothers - I remember, but they were distant in serious ways - linguistically, geographically - they had their own realities in the end.  Both of them - I wasn't close with them.  I didn't have a feeling.  I was thinking - nobody I really like has ever died - then I remembered my poor uncle and his son both in a month of each other last year - my poor cousin on the heroin - his own kids running and playing at his funeral.  Maybe they didn't know him.  I didn't, not really.  His dad I knew-  well enough.  Sad - well.  Not for me.  I"m starting to think I don't have a good understanding or mechanism for facing death.  Because I looked at my aunts and cousins and my uncle's poor wife there at the wake - and they were all tears and horror - it was really, really sad - and for them I felt a terrible sympathy - I wanted for them - I wanted for them a better feeling that I had no way of conjuring, and so I sat and was quiet and when people wanted hugs they got them, when they wanted words I tried.  

But I never thought of how sad it will be not to see them anymore.  I didn't think it was sad.  I mean, not in a callous hateful way - I mean, it isn't sad.  People go - it's not what happens.  Isn't it?  Never again - I might not have the concept ironed out.  Maybe I just don't have the skill of missing the absent.  Bad at noticing details - like a dirty room - it upsets people-  other people - not me, who knew the room was dirty?  Symmetry?  Why?  It matters man - to a lot of people - and it's just something I don't see - like ultraviolet light or radio frequencies.

I wonder why. 

Comments

[aslant.livejournal.com]

There have been plenty of random distant deaths in my extended family -- nothing close enough to make me really feel it. But a good friend committed suicide a couple years ago and I find it's her death that allowed me to understand the sadness. Or at least, the frustrated sense of missing her. I want to call her up and get her opinion on something, and then I remember I can't, and I remember how she disappeared, all over again.