Just a few weeks after I submitted my latest essay, "The Crab in the Stars," to the journal Brevity, and a few weeks before I received the editor's response accepting it for inclusion in Issue 29, my grandmother died.  Though not entirely unexpected, the timing of her passing seemed uncanny to me, because the essay was about the death of my grandfather (her husband) when I was twelve, and a strange visitation which occured that day which distracted me from grieving about it for a while.  I wrote the essay thinking of my grandmother, though I never did get to share it with her.  I had wanted to wait until it was published first.

Her funeral was held in the same church where my grandfather's had been almost twenty years earlier.  I sat in a pew while my cousin (the one who had been most wracked with hilarity at the minister's misapplied lipstick, last time around) calmly delivered a eulogy extolling my grandmother's selflessness and love of family, "practical" gifts (dickeys anyone?) and stocked cookie jars.  It started out exactly the way a grandmother's funeral should be.  But when we got to the cemetery and crowded under a small tent over the open grave, while rain fell around us, a veritable plague of mosquitoes laid siege.  I think my mother might have landed the first blow on my father's head to kill one that had lighted upon his temple.  Pretty soon we were all slapping them off each other and ourselves, swatting and scratching while the ceremony went on around us, trying to minimize profane utterances in light of the occasion.  But not even the minister could keep from smacking a mosquito on his forehead while intoning the bit about ashes and dust, leaving a smear of blood over his eye.

What struck me as troubling when I was twelve—the fact that life goes on, in all of its absurdity, even when something awful happens that ought to require us take a solemn and reflective pause—now seems like reason for delight, or at least relief.

I wonder what my grandmother would have said if I could have showed her the essay—whether she would have been able to affirm or contradict my recollections of the events, and how she would have felt about it now.  In the end, she outlived the habits of gentleness and propriety that had characterized her for most of her life; she spent her final days in nursing homes where she occasionally made inappropriate references to sex and dumped glasses of orange juice on other old ladies.  Her memory had been failing for years.  Part of me just wants to feel bad about all this, but another part of me thinks that being able to see it all as an interesting (and, frankly, hilarious) story is a better way to get by.