Death.

Last night my neighbours had an all night vigil. I was up reading The Outsiders and having a bit of a meltdown when I realised that it was about 3 a.m and they were still going.

I've only ever been to about two or three funerals in my life and even less weddings. I'm not very into both of those things. Both are a celebration of life or they both can be a mourning. My neighbours decided to have their little service thingy in their garden. My bedroom window is very close to where they were having it and so I could hear what was going on. They asked my mom to bake them a few scones and stuff, she was still up at about 4 this morning, going on with the baking. I never got any of those baked goods. Anyway, as I was sitting around in my room, completely minding my own business, my shred of silence was torn apart by loud screams. It seems that one of the Granddaughters was finally stricken by grief and the finality of it all.
I hated it. I hated every single minute of it. It pierced deep into my head and just kept ringing and ringing and ringing. This poor girl shrieking about her Grandmother that was now gone, her light snuffed out like a candle in the wind. People tried to console her but it really was doing no good. Eventually I thought to myself that they should just let her be. Let the poor child get it all out of her system, let her come to terms with it in the best way she knew how. I remember going to my uncle's funeral a few years back. It was an open casket affair. I wasn't the most tight with that uncle. We spoke, he did his uncle duties and that was that, he was still quite young. I remember when it was time to pay the last respects, everyone walked past the casket and did their thing but I just hung back. I just didn't feel up to it. My throat was laden down with a lump larger than the sun and I knew that if I went past for one final time, I'd turn into a dam and that puzzled me. We weren't best buddies but now here I was feeling sad, not because I knew him so well but because he was piece of my family gone. Today when I heard that girl crying, I wasn't upset by the fact that her gran was dead, it didn't move me at all. What upset me was the memory of how I felt when I was in a similar situation.

Death comes for all of us, that is guaranteed. We all deal with it in different ways.
Sent from my BlackBerry®