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Yep – I’m a Joiner!
You Might be a Zealot If…
As much as I hate that guy who does the redneck jokes, I can’t help (during these final days before the election) looking at both sides and wondering if all the supporters of all the parties in the entire US of A have lost their darn minds.
So, I came up with this list. You don’t have to tell me if you scored on it or not, it’s okay. Everyone seems to have a little zealot in them this election.
Here are some warning signs that you might be past the loving supporter stage and into that wild-eyed “zealot” stage of support.
- If you don’t understand why the other party doesn’t like your candidate.
- If you think being a community organizer or a war veteran makes your candidate a “no-brainer” choice.
- You think that your side is the only one playing fair and being respectful during the election.
- If you really think your candidate is the only choice.
- If you talk about your candidate and people start looking at you the way they look at the people that come to their door to save their souls.
- When you sound angry all the time in defending your candidate or tearing down the other candidate.
- When you’re having two different conversations on Twitter and you say to one of the people “I’m having the same conversation twice” because you’re totally not listening and you’re just talking about what you want to talk about.
- You have the nerve to tell a well-informed person that their question/argument is “just another GOP/Dem talking point.” That’s WHY it’s a talking point, because there’s something to TALK about.
- Assuming your side is going to win to the extent you are cocky.
- You feel fervor – actual in-a-church-yelling-hallelujah fervor – when you think of your candidate or talk about your candidate.
- You get whipped into a froth over something that you would normally consider totally stupid. Be it one candidate leaving his first wife, or another candidate approving a 3 Million dollar projector (and not bothering to check what kind of projector costs that much.) Or a candidate getting a bajillion dollar makeover (while not remembering how much Hillary spent on clothes.) Or swearing an oath on the Koran or calling the other candidate “that guy.” Or even questioning the nationality of a candidate. Or you care if Joe the Plumber paid his taxes or how much he makes or even have a moment where you actually care about some dude named Joe you’ve never met. Or that a crazy racist yelled something ignorant and hateful at a rally. Or that at one point one candidate was pals with some guy that hates America. Well, duh. There are a lot of people that hate America – mostly everyone who threatens to move to Canada depending on the outcome of the election. But a guy who hates America is not going to run for president. Another duh. But either way on all these points, it doesn’t matter. It’s just fluff. A million little stupid, meaningless things that won’t affect a presidency one bit. Yeah, if you’re freaking out over this stuff, you may be a zealot. If you can explain away the ones that are aimed toward your candidate but are behind the ones that are aimed toward the other candidate and yelling about how wrong/unfair/horrible these thigns are…you are TOTALLY a zealot.
I’ve seen every one of these (save number 7, which was a totally personal experience) from both parties. Do I see it more from Obama supporters? Sure! But that’s because, for some reason, social media leans more heavily liberal than conservative. I do my best to stay neutral, but the closer and closer the election comes, the more I see opinion thrown out as truth, and people take it in as if it were truth, because there’s this big circle-jerk where someone says something, everyone agrees, and then everyone hugs (virtually) because they are all so darn right. They are filled with the rightness.
For some reason, no one stops for a moment to say to themselves, “Wow, either way here we’re voting for a presidential candidate that’s human. Someone that has experimented with drugs, drinks, and wants to be the President of the United States.”
See, for me, that’s a problem. I don’t know how I feel about any candidate that wants the job so badly as Obama/McCain do. Or any candidate for that matter.
I mean, you have to think you’re qualified to run, right? Of course you do. Heck, the word experience keeps getting thrown at someone every day, be it Obama or Palin. But it doesn’t matter. See, I don’t know that I will ever do anything in my life that makes me feel I’m qualified for the job of President, and I think anyone that does (from a war vet to a community organizer) has a mental condition that should seriously be checked out. No matter what party you represent. No one should think they are up for that task, much less spend a year convincing the rest of the country they are. It’s a messed up process.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want someone assigned as president or anything like that, I just think there need to be more than two choices. The democrats and republicans are just different shades of gray, and watching people convince themselves their lives will be so much better under A or B candidate is wearying.
Do I think you should proselytize like a door to door religious person? Sure, if the mood strikes you. But preaching to the choir is just silly – which is why I don’t understand all the fuss on social networks. You’re not going to swing an undecided voter on Facebook or Twitter.
If you want to make a difference, you should be calling people in Ohio or some other swing state and make sure they are voting the way you want to see them vote. You have the white pages right here on the Internet.
Stop telling me who to vote for and tell someone that isn’t informed. Tell someone that is having trouble making a decision. Tell an idiot – because it’s the idiots of the world that make elections and elect presidents. There aren’t enough smart kids to make a difference in the polling booths, so the smart kids need to be smart and find ways to influence groups of not-smart kids.
Because no matter who you’re backing, there is still time to make a difference or solidify the lead or do whatever it is you want to see happen.
I fully expect one comment, at least, to tell me this post was a Democratic or Republican talking point. Because that’s what I would do 
Oh – one last thing – I’m not saying being a zealot is a bad thing. Just know you are and be able to dial it down a notch when talking to an undecided voter. Zealots don’t convert people that make a difference – just ask the door to door religion salespeople.
Question: Do you think the political fervor will die down once the election is finished? If so…how fast? Do you think the political bloggers will continue on once the election is over?
I Never Thought I’d Say That
Abby (running into the office in full whine mode): “Sister hit me!”
Me (calling into the living room): “Sadie, can you come in here please?”
Sadie (running into the office with an innocent look): “Yes, mommy?”
Me: “Did you hit sister?”
Sadie: “Yes, but she hit me first.”
Me (to Abby): “Did you hit sister?”
Abby: “Yes.”
Me (to both): “You hit her and she hit you – I think you guys are even, don’t you?”
Abby & Sadie (happily, in chorus): “Yes!”
With that, my daughters run off to go back and play.
I don’t like my girls hitting each other. I want them to play nice, share, not scream, and get along. I want them to be best friends through thick and thin. I want them to have someone to always be there for them and cheer them on.
Instead I let them hit each other. Sure I tell myself that I’m letting them resolve disputes and learn responsibility and cause and effect. I tell myself that they’ll be stronger and more independent because I don’t get involved in every slap or every fight that happens.
But then I wonder if I’m just lying to myself. Maybe I should curl them up in little balls in bed with me and snuggle them and fix every owie and keep them happy and good-tempered and surrounded in a pink ball of fuzzy love 24/7. I want to protect them and snuggle them and have them wandering around like home is Disney World and they are thrilled to be here.
Don’t all moms have fantasies like that? Where mom is perfect, the kids are perfect, and life doesn’t get any better than your living room? Where my house is always clean and dinner is on the table at 6:15pm when my husband walks through the door? Where I wear pumps to vacuum and wear an apron so my rockin’ dress doesn’t get messy while I cook? Where my daughters wear perfectly little starched pink dresses and play with dolls that never get dirty or have chunks of hair pulled out from being in the middle of a tug-of-war game.
The world where there is always enough money, always enough time, and my only worry is making sure the already-immaculate house is dusted. Where neighbors come over for coffee and we talk about nothing of any importance. Maybe we gossip a little but then feel guilty because that’s unkind.
My husband comes home, takes off his fedora, and puts down his briefcase. Then, after the help (hey, it’s my fantasy, I can have help) serves dinner we all play scrabble or some other fun-yet-smart game that will make the kids little geniuses.
Fast forward….when they accept the Nobel for curing Cancer they will thank me, and say that without their amazing, spectacular, perfect family they could not have achieved all this.
I will dab at the proud, happy tear in my perfectly made-up eye with a lace handkerchief, turn to my husband (the one I never, ever argue with) and say, “We did so good!”
Yeah…that’s what happens when my kids slap each other.
Deadlines – A Love Hate Relationship
Why is it that so much of my work seems to come in at the end of the month?
With a due date of “the end of the month.”
If I get any sleep between now and Friday I will be amazed. Don’t get me wrong, the money that comes with the projects is great and I’m not complaining about having work. I know better than to be snobby and whiny about too much work when everyone is in recession panic mode.
But it feels like Thursday, I don’t know how much sleep I’ll be getting between now and Friday morning, and honestly, if it weren’t for my budget I’d probably get an extension on at least one of my projects.
But the budget drives all.
Finishing these projects and getting them in before Friday means that phase one of debt payoff will be complete. (There are four phases, the phases make me feel better.) Phase two will be half gone, and there will be more than the normal emergency fund account available to us in case of, well, emergency.
So I hate my deadlines and wish I’d been assigned these projects the first week of the month…but I’d rather have deadlines to complain about than no work.
Back to the grindstone. My nose got a little break while I blogged.
If you’re in the Chicagoland area, check MommyBlog Reveiws tomorrow morning for a chance to win one (or two) of ten free tickets to the American Baby Faire in Schaumburg happening this weekend. Freebies, toys, crawling races, and other fun things for you and your baby. Expectant moms welcome too!
Why Bill Collectors are Idiots
We’ve had to deal with a lot of bill collectors in the past few months. Paying off bills requires you answer the phone when people call, so you can give them money.
While most bill collectors are absolutely wonderful when they find you are on the line and ready and willing to hand over your hard-earned money, there are some that make it difficult and time consuming.
Our favorite is the company that bought the Chase debt we had. That’s right, we had a credit card. It was cut up the day of our wedding, but it had a balance when we cut it up and closed the account. $2300 to be exact. That, coupled with being dirt-poor from our wedding day until about two years ago, means that somewhere along the line Chase got a judgment against us and then sold the debt to a bill collector. The total we owed by the time it got to the bill collector was (insert drum roll) was a not unsurprising $4700.
Yea for fees!
Six months ago, Randy talked to a rep on the phone who threatened to put a lien on our car (we now know they couldn’t do that) and set up a six month payment plan based on post-dated checks (yes, we now know that’s a bad idea) for $250/mo. Thanks to that agreement we found ourselves in pretty dire straights in the beginning. But the last payment was made on the 17th of this month and we tried to call before it went through to find out “next steps” – or a settlement amount for the remaining balance.
For two days Randy called and called, only to be told the person he needed to talk to was either in meetings or on vacation (depending on who picked up the phone.) No one knew what happened next and kept telling us we had to talk to the one person who could access the account. We left messages on his voicemail and with secretaries and receptionists and coworkers.
It’s now the 26th and no one has called back.
We have it in writing that they were only going to make the six withdrawals with check numbers listed. Then there was going to be a “reassessment” of the account. Seriously, I have a letter that says so.
So why won’t they talk to us?
The collection company that is taking care of this is infamous for being evil and unhelpful to those that do not pay. They will call the workplace, family, friends, anyone they can find on a skip trace, and your dog if he has a phone number to be contacted at. But we got no contact whatsoever during the time our payments were being taken out.
How utterly stupid is that?
So the new plan, because one lady we got on the phone told us that of our remaining balance (after the last six payments) of $3250 she could see our rep being willing to settle for $2900 or even $3000 dollars.
Uh huh. Sure.
The thing is, if we had charged up $4700 in merchandise I’d have no problem just paying them everything and being quiet. But you know what, if collection agencies are willing to settle, and considering we’ve already given them $1500…why not try to settle?
The other little problem with this totally untrustworthy collection agency is they are known for taking the money and not reporting payments or settlements with the credit agencies. For example, my Charles Schwab accounts were both denied shortly after approval because they show I have the debt, but they don’t show I’ve been paying $250/mo. for the last six months on the debt. Therefore, no accounts for me because we show as an evilbad credit risk.
So now when the company i cannot remember the name of does call back, we’re going to be coming at them from a place of power, knowledge, and the ability to pay.
Maybe they know that and that’s why they’re not calling back. Bill collectors hate talking to informed consumers that know they’ve been lied to in the past.
So now we’re trying to decide if we want to start sending in $20/mo. in order to get them to call…or if not making a payment this month will get them on the phone.
The bottom line is we don’t need the credit. Next car? Going to buy used and pay in cash. Next house? Not until this one is paid off and we can pay the balance in cash. What else do we need credit for? We have a savings account that is only going to get bigger and a ShareBuilder account that is only going to have more stocks and mutual funds bought and added to our portfolio.
Do you know what the best way would be to get them on the phone and willing to talk to us about a settlement arrangement? I don’t have the experience to know what the best next move to make should be.
How We Modified Dave Ramsey’s Baby Steps
The first two steps according to Dave Ramsey:
- Baby Step One: Have $1000 in an emergency account.
- Baby Step Two: Pay off all Non-Mortgage Debt using the Snowball Method
It makes sense, and I get why he sets it up that way…but we tried doing that and it didn’t work for us. See, we were paying down debt before we found Dave, and to stop paying that down to make an emergency account…it hurt too much to stop paying. It was emotionally weird for us to stop making payments on debt to build up an emergency account.
Plus we don’t have debts that have minimum payments at this point. We have debt-debt like that AT&T bill that lingered after we shut off the service that we finally paid off last month. There’s no minimum payment for that, they just want their darn money.
So here’s what we did.
We set up automatic withdrawls of $100 twice a month to our ING Direct savings account (this is the “takes three days to transfer to the bank account” savings account) so that builds at a rate of $200 per month. Not a huge amount of money, but it’s something. Then we keep $500 in the Bank of America savings (that can be transferred over instantly) for non-emergency-emergencies (NEEs). What is a NEE? If I’m $100 short of paying something off, I’ll take it from savings. If there is more stuff to do than money, that’s a NEE.
I’m a freelancer, so my income fluctuates month-to-month. One time on the Dave Ramsey Show (on the FOX Business Network) I heard Dave say that small business owners and freelancers should have a separate emergency fund for stuff like this. The $1000 should just sit and do nothing forever, and then there should be another fund (he suggested calling it the “hill and valley fund”) for expenses, and then the “real” emergency fund with 3-6 months’ worth of expenses in it.
Complicated much?
I mean, how many savings accounts am I supposed to be rocking at once? For us, paying off debt as soon as possible because the work is coming in now makes more sense than funding the savings account that we’ll have to use if the money dies up anyway.
Maybe that would be good for us if we had $20k in credit card debt or something, but we didn’t. Our debt is not that bad compared to most people. Right now our most massive payments (not including mortgage) are for the student loans. $285/mo. to Randy’s student loan and $185/mo. to my student loan. But, that’s to rehab those loans though the government rehab program. In April and May respectively those loans will go back to the government and the monthly payments as well as the totals on those debts will drop by about half. That will make them far easier to pay off, but we can’t do anything to prepay those until they are out of the rehab system and into the government’s hands again.
So those payments are fixed and the goal is to have everything else paid off up to those student loans by the time they revert back in April and May. Possibly overzealous as goals go, but it’s something we really want.
With the economic uncertainty going on right now, who knows how stable my freelancing really is? I think it’s only going to get better from here, but I don’t want to pin my hopes on a star and pray everything is going to be okay. I want to be prepared, and paying off debt and becoming financially secure is my version of making sure there are extra gallons of water and duct tape in the attic in case the apocalypse happens.
My goal is still the same – to hold a dollar in my hand and know it is mine. No one else holds claim to my dollar. That is my definition of freedom.
Ultimately, we changed up the Dave Ramsey plan because (as he says) it’s all about changing your habits. If our habit is to pay debt, changing that so we can then change it back is counter-intuitive and unhelpful.
At least, that’s how we see it here.
Lack of Sleep – Lots of Work – Yeah, I’m Happy
Funeral weekend was a whirlwind. I hope to have the thank-you card over to @Tzurriz by the end of the day, but my deadline keeps me firmly at my desk while my need for respect makes it impossible to say thank you with anything less than a hand written note. (She sent a fruit basket that’s kept my kids happy for two days, drenched in fruit juicy goodness – that deserves a paper note!)
But the projects in front of me represent a turning point in our budget next month. Where the last “large chunk of money” goes out and we might actually, really, no kidding be paying off the car next month (If you had a dollar for every time I’ve said that you’d have, like, five whole dollars…I know…) But I keep saying it out loud because the intent is no less important this month than it was last month.
If you follow me on Twitter, you know I have about 22,500 words to write by Monday morning, and I’m writing in my blog instead. Because I’m a slacker. Or, wait…maybe it’s because I’m really tired and didn’t get the full night’s sleep I hoped for last night, or the night before.
The kids are sick. I’m sick. We’re all exhausted. But that doesn’t make the deadlines go away, and I know I have another project going through on Monday I have to be ready to write for. If I can get it all in by the end of the month for payment in November…well..it’ll be a good month and the car will be easier to pay off.
I’m cheating on Dave Ramsey – I’m paying down debt simultaneously with building the savings account. I know I’m supposed to just have an emergency account, but building that without paying things off was not giving us the satisfaction we needed to keep going.
We’re having a home phone line installed on the 10th of November and I need to be 100% certain that the only calls that come in on that line are people who dialed my number – no bill collectors. We’re down to one, by the way. One that I’m more than happy to let Randy set up an auto-debit for if they call before the 1st of the month. One little $200 bill and phase one of the debt-paying off is complete.
I’ll do a separate post on the debt groupings, as well as on the one creditor that is an idiot par none.
So I’m running on fumes from not enough sleep, I’m working like a dog to meet a morning deadline….and things are really good. We’ll miss gramma, sure, but the sun came up and things go on and we can miss her while we work.
Hopefully I’ll get some decent sleep tonight.
No One Died When I was Young
When I was young…as far back as I can remember…I’ve had a problem with death.
Not the whole “I don’t understand” problem, quite the opposite.
I was quickly ostracized as a child, because playing cops and robbers…or cowboys and Indians (my apologies, i didn’t know it was racially insensitive when I was seven) when someone got shot or hit with an arrow…I cried.
Again…let me clarify. I didn’t cry. I did deep, wretched, wailing-wall sobs that would eventually make me throw up and choke and I was absolutely inconsolable.
I knew it was pretend. I know my friends were just playing at being dead. I still could not control it. Trust me, I tried. I was embarrassed that my friends thought I was stupid and thought they were really, for real, dead. I tried to explain I knew they weren’t dead but really didn’t have the tools at that age to say I was having an existential crisis.
When I was a teenager, it dawned on me someone would die eventually, and i wondered how it would affect me. Would I go nuts like I did at seven? (My friends eventually took me back into the fray and we just put the bad guys in jail and as cowboys we roped and rode horses instead of killing Indians.) Would I be numb when the “real thing” happened?
My first funeral was for my fiancee’s grandfather. I never went into the viewing room and kept it together nicely. Having never met the man, it wasn’t too difficult. I was comforting to my fiancee and we got through it. I thought, “Wow, I’m a rock star! I only freak at pretend death!” A weight felt like it had been lifted off of my shoulders.
The next foray I made into a funeral home started with a phone call from my mother. “Jen, you have to go to Joy’s son’s funeral, because she was my best friend for 20 years and I can’t get there from Las Vegas.” I figure I can be an ambassador for the family, after all, I’m a rock star, right? My friend who vaguely remembered the guy from high school went with me.
I was not entirely prepared for the intensity a suicide funeral entails. I thought this would be a repeat of the distant, never-met grandfather’s funeral.
Thanks to her I got to experience my very first funeral “showboater” – my term for the person that just has NO RIGHT to fall apart all crazytown style at the funeral. She was sobbing louder than the guy’s wife, girlfriend, and mother combined. It was kind of embarrassing. Luckily (that’s sarcasm, be prepared) the mother of the deceased was so over-the-moon gone from the loss of her son, she thought I was my mother. So I got this amazing, completely undeserved, best friend treatment. She took me to the casket and showed me how the funeral makeup people did “such a good job fixing his head…you can’t even see where the bullet went in unless you look really close…”
What could I do? This mother’s grief was so overwhelming. I played along, answering to my mother’s name all night. After I got home I called mom and told her that if Joy called her she was to pretend she had been there, as I had discussed with the family. She did and all was well.
The difference with that one is that I knew the guy from high school. He was a stoner and I was a total nerd in high school, but we had a class together and remembered me and us playing together when we were young. That got me left alone by a large part of the H.S. population that probably would have made mincemeat out of my pegged jeans and one HyperColor sweatshirt that I wore into the ground two years too later to be cool.
I went home and remember being in an almost trance-like state. I looked at my great-grandmother and said, “It’s started.”
She, of course, asked me what the hell I was talking about.
“I’ve been though a lot, grams, but death has been kind enough not to come to my door. Now that someone I know is gone…it’s only going to get closer and closer and the next one is going to hurt so much.”
She looked at me like I’d gone insane. I felt like Cassandra, the Oracle no one believed.
The discussion ended there.
The next funeral I attended was for my ex-fiancee. I was told by his mother he had an undiagnosed heart condition and that’s what did him in. It was sad, and it hurt, but I was prepared for this one. I knew the people attending, I knew who they were, and only thought it was a little, tiny bit creepy they wanted me there early for the family viewing.
Until I walked in, sat in the back of the room on a comfy chair to get my mettle up to go check out the casket, and my ex-fiancees beautiful little nephew came running up in all his bright eyed, bushy tailed glory…looked me in the eyes with a quizzical cock of his head…and asked me, “How do you think it feels to hang yourself?”
Thankfully the friend that was with me (not the showboater from earlier) immediately sprang up and asked little Elmo (that’s what we called him) “I think I saw a frog out front, want to go see?” They ran off together and I was alone.
I also ended up giving four guys a complex during that funeral. It was so surreal. The eulogy was given by a friend from high school he hadn’t talked to in almost ten years and he got my name wrong. I laughed REALLY loud. Couldn’t help it. It was funny. He felt awful about it. Then three “friends” of my ex walked in together and (I’ve been told by multiple sources) I pointed at the group and said, “It should have been you.”
Two years later one of my friends had the cojones to ask who I meant, and I found out for two years they had been trying to figure out who I meant. I figured it couldn’t hurt to be honest, “I didn’t care. He was a better person than any or all of you.” Question answered.
Pretty traumatic, right? You all know I still blame myself. I mean, you would too if you were me. We were the on again, off again couple. Even if he was my ex…I never thought it would stay that way. Neither did he. It was just a thing, the being apart. But you can’t go back. You can’t fix dead. (Please don’t comment that it wasn’t my fault. I know it’s not, really, I promise. LOL I’ll say whatever you want to not have the conversation!)
So at two under-30 suicide funerals I figured I maybe, just maybe had paid my dues for holding off death-coping for the early part of my life.
Then my best friend died of cancer and I had to cope with that funeral. The dreams I had about it. I had horriffic dreams. For months. I don’t talk about it much. I was there the night she died. Not right next to her, but hours before, where I was able to tell her everything I wanted to. I never got that chance with the ex and it still haunts me. That last phone call where I wanted to say “I love you” but didn’t because I was embarrassed.
The next funeral I went to (so our tally now is one normal grampa funeral, two under-30 suicides and a cancer funeral on my best friend’s 25th birthday) was for a friend of a friend’s son. He was 16 months old and the funeral home had been set up like a nursery. The deceased was displayed in a crib with Veggie Tales posters on the walls and a television playing Veggie Tales not far away. The eulogy started with (here’s a shocker) the Veggie Tales theme song. We all sang along.
I still get queasy when I hear, “If you’d like to talk to tomatoes…if a squash can make you smile…”
At the end of the service the mother didn’t want to leave but didn’t want to hold the child…so the funeral director picked him up and rocked him in a rocking chair. She sang to him. Until she said, “We have to take him back now, he’s starting to get a little leaky…which is completely normal.”
I remember thinking, “There is nothing normal about any of this.” There is nothing normal about death, about funerals in general. Nothing normal at all.
The next funeral was a girl with much history. Both with my husband and most of my friends, including some history with me. She took a taxi to a gun range and, well, yeah. The girl was a compulsive liar and so was her mother, so a couple people came to my house to ask me to do what no one else could. Prove it. I called the gun range, told a story, and confirmed the incident did happen.
Her funeral went normally until the priest said, “She touched so many.” That’s where about five people did the snort-laugh that was quickly covered by much, MUCH coughing. No one wanted her dead, but that does not take away from the fact that the girl got AROUND. We all still feel appropriately guilty for laughing. I promise.
Last year on Halloween (do you see how there’s always a quirky “thing” attached?) was my favorite Gramma of Randy’s. I loved her. But I was fine. My heart hurt for Grampa K who loved her more than he loved himself. They had a great marriage up to the end.
That’s where the funeral stories end.
Most of my grief lives inside of me somewhere. I don’t look at it often. It’s in a box on a shelf in the back corner of my head. It’s dusty and has a few cobwebs on it and I do my best not to see it out of the corner of my eye if I have to go in the room for something else.
But funerals always jimmy the box open, because a little more has to go into the box. I can’t own the grief for other people’s grandparents – that’s for their family, not extended in-law family like me.
It’s one of the reasons I ended up passing on the wake tonight. I just…couldn’t take two days of death focus.
Want to know what’s quirky about this funeral? The mass is being held at the church I got married at, of course! Bricks for that church were laid in part by Randy’s grandmother’s husband. It was not only appropriate for us to get married there, it is appropriate for her funeral mass to be there.
That doesn’t mean it won’t be totally weird to walk down that aisle for the first time since I said, “I do” and listened to our priest talk about Mother Theresa taking babies out of dumpsters in Calcutta to die in her arms. (Yep that was during my wedding. Surreal is my middle name.)
I’ll probably cry. Death is not fun, nor is it pretty. Six seasons of Six Feet Under haven’t taken the sting away, nor has watching umpteen horror movies trying to become desensitized.
But there’s more than enough room in the box. Besides, as long as it’s someone else’s family … it’s not my grandmother and great-grandmother. Yeah, that’s my bottom line. Death is still leaving my family alone…for now…and I am wildly grateful every day death does not touch my immediate family.
Good Things, Bad Things, Stuff Happens Like That
Yesterday we found out that Randy’s grandmother passed away.
Sure she was old, and had Alzheimer’s, and kept breaking out (I’m so not kidding) out of different nursing homes, missed her long-ago passed away husband, and had almost entirely lost her sense of balance.
But even with all that, it’s really sad. Not sad in that, “Gone before her time” way, but sad in a “Wow, I’ll really miss her” way.
The thing is, I don’t miss her the way she is now. I miss her the way she used to be when I first met her (the family says she was already not in the best shape when I met her but she seemed okay, albeit deaf, to me.)
When the elderly pass, it’s like we mourn the fact that until that moment we had hope they might wake up one day as the person we remembered from our youth, or even ten years ago. What we lose isn’t just the shell of the person that is nothing like the one we remember, we lose that hope that we might have seen another glimpse while they were still here.
It doesn’t make it hurt less to know that’s what the feeling is…I’m just sharing, like I always do. Because I don’t really know how to react. I wasn’t close to this grandmother like I was to Randy’s other grandmother that passed away last year … right around this time, as a matter of fact. His Gramma K’s funeral was on Halloween.
Sadly, his only grandmothers left are mine, and they’re not in the best of health either. Especially my great-grandmother, who is 93 and amazingly ok for her age. But…not so great if she were 50, know what I mean?
He went to work this morning, but will leave early to go to the wake. Then, we will drop our kids off at a friend’s tomorrow so I can attend the funeral with Randy.
On a brighter note, today I’m hunkering down and focusing on what I’m doing, what I need to be doing, and how to get it done. A schedule. Daily goals for where to write and what to write there. So I don’t get lost in the sea of blogs.
Bye Gramma Vera. You will be missed.
