02.12.07
And life just keeps going on…
Death is such a fascinating phenomenon. It puts everyone through such a wide range of emotions. We dread it and fear it, though some of us welcome it. The survivors inevitably grow and learn from it. Until X died last month, I hadn’t lost anyone very close to me since I was a child. Though Grandsweetie’s mother died almost two years ago, which definitely threw me for a while, I hadn’t been that close to her at the end. It was hard, she was so distressed and often belligerent to me. I still miss her though and wish she were around to love her beautiful daughter. But I’m digressing. I forgot what real intense grief is like. It has been interesting noticing the different stages. The first two weeks, when I least expected it, I was overtaken by deep crying. I washed my car a lot in those first few weeks. An automatic carwash is a great place to let yourself lose it emotionally. You can scream and cry for those couple of minutes, and no one can hear or see you. Boy, my car was really clean. Now I keep expecting X to show up to pay child support or just hang out. Also, for some reason, people from our ( X’s and my) past have randomly shown up at our (Kav and Cav’s) last two shows, not realizing I was one of the performers and also not knowing that X had died only weeks before. These were people from at least 20 years ago. Then … I wanted to call X up to tell him about it. Life just keeps getting stranger and stranger. Thankfully, Grandsweetie has stopped playing “dead”. She kept laying her dolls down on the floor and telling me to cry because they were dead. Then we had to take turns being dead while the other person cried. No one else would play this game with her. I thought and still think she is brilliant and figured out her own way of dealing with all the death she has experienced in her brief 3 years. It was a hard game to play, though. I have to admit that I am relieved it’s over. Now we have all of X’s things to deal with as well as legal issues, property, etc. I’m sure we will figure it all out, then things can get back to normal - whatever that is.