last fish he ever caught

I dragged ass bouncing through Detroit home – I hate that trip, 6 hours just to take two 40-minute flights, stinky airplane air bluck—wondering how mourning works exactly. I mean, I get grief. But that's not the same thing. And I'm not sure what the difference is. My grandfather was one of those "greatest generation" guys who, thus, got the honor guard, the flag thing, the soldier salute part, the (free!- God, my people do love anything that's free) tombstone from the government, and this seemed to help a lot. It was as if the whole world stopped with us for a minute and also noticed that he had died. And the baby, she helps - funny stories about my boys, the new puppy-maybe, etc etc etc helped turn my mother's mind "to the living" as she put it. Even my grandmother, she went down the hall to have dinner in the dining room for the first time (they stayed alone together ALWAYS in their room) and took a seat amidst the ladies - she chews shyly, looking with poised hostility left and right lest one of the other widows says something stupid or starts talking about tatting or something that'll make her head pop off annoyed. She looks a hell of a lot like TJ in kindergarten, big time.

In the end, it was just as my sister said, they were instructed to tell him it was okay to go, and they sooo couldn't, not one of them - my mother HOWLED no no NO! (Santa is an asshole, NO!) by her own description. When they bundled g-ma up and "hauled her ass over there", she did it. She told him (not unkindly, but certainly not howling), "Go on Doug, I'll be along in a little bit", and he nodded like O Okay and then went to sleep.

The hospice people also told my mother to cut his hair off, bc often people want that later. My mom tells me this, sitting at my sis's this morning, we're drinking tea and I ask, "What's in this envelope?" on the table, and she tells me it's his hair and I can't help it, I say "Why the hell would anyone want that?!" She says, "That's exactly what your grandmother said." (lol) Well?? People who were Victorians kept lockets of hair, she says. (pause) (LOL) Are you a Victorian?? We start laughing and she's crying but we can't stop laughing. I laugh until I'm snorting, THAT IS SO GROSS!! Then we sober up and she says, Well you might want that sort of thing ya never know. (LOL) And we're off again giggling like hell, Geod No mom I will never want to pet your corpse hair -Do you want me to pet your head NOW?, cz that'd be okay I guess. (I pet her.) Laughing and laughing, while she cries off and on. And I think hmmmm: Mourning. I suspect that mourning will be one of those things that will turn out I had no clue how to do in any normal way, so I'll have to wing it totally.

Now I’m home, and feel like I am walking travel-crud. I’m gonna take a long hot bath in my deep old tub with one of those ugly oatmeal deals, water the plants, make a shopping list, wrap some presents, hope FPH can show up as planned and haul an xmas tree or maybe just lay around whatever, and as I think about that I’ll imagine(smell) a pine tree and I’m going to feel relatively glad to not be dead at all. So far, mourning feels very specific to the person who is missing, who in this case was the happiest person to catch a fish or to see a cardinal on a birdfeeder (every time) ever. Like a dream you wake from and can't remember except that it was good. Like a sentence fragment. An evocative inherently incomplete thought.

"Swing Low, Sweet Chariot," Charlie Haden, Hank Jones