Little Rocks, Stood on End

In which our Hero finds comfort in family, and loss

I don’t know how to describe where I’ve been. Buried I guess is the best way to describe it, though it is not much of a place to talk about, nor unique in any way. Buried by promises, buried by obligations. But that’s metaphor.

“You made me so sad,” Hollywood suddenly said to me as we picked over the fancy section for wines to gift our mentor with. As just a moment before he’d been talking about finding a particular label, I looked up startled, as he continued.

“I read your blog on the weekend. About what you wanted to do with your body when you die. It made me so sad to think of all that.”

It’s the more complete version of an idea I started to dig into here, but with my mom’s health issues and the loss of my uncle, the start of my year was kind of rough and I’ve just entirely neglected the blog since the start of the year. I need to write something happier, I told him today.

I don’t think I’m going to be able to pull it off today, though. I’ve just lost another uncle, I’ve learned. I went to check on my father, because this is one of his best friends from childhood, and we talked about options for the funeral. He asked me if I wanted to go and I told him not at all. But that I think I really should. If anybody asks, it’s for my aunt, who I thought was just a sweet lady. The main reason is that this was my father’s someone, regardless of my own affection for him.

The rightness of the choice was clear in the way he reacted to my choice. I think he’s pleased that I volunteered even after I’d been given an out. My dad’s little brother called then, with an update. They were passing the news down the grapevine, making sure their sister had heard, and that my grandmother’s response to the news was her sorrow that he’d passed away so far from home, from his people. Instead he’s here, with his children and grandkids, but too far for most of the rest of the family to come to send him off. “He has nobody to be there for him.”

We will try to be there for him. Of course, traveling at the last minute during the US during Thanksgiving week with an incoming storm will be a hell of a fun trip.