The MOTH's generally doesn't do well. They have no belief & so death tends to be traumatic.
For us it is different. It has been hardest on CG who is in Chile & who has rung & messaged & needed regular updates so as not to feel left out & excluded just because she is so far away. That has been my job.
The MOTH has been in charge of his mum. Meanwhile his siblings have been spinning wildly out of control organising all the funeral details without consulting anybody else ~ not the MOTH's mum; not the MOTH; not his friends & they chose a *family only* funeral service.
None of this would matter except that GD had a lot of friends on the island & so we must organise a way for the island to say goodbye because this is still a small, tight~knit community & GD wasn't even cold before news of his death had spread like wildfire. No such thing as confidentiality when it comes to the island.
So we have booked the hall where we have church & I began thinking about what I could, in honesty, say without being nasty. GD & I were like oil & water. We had nothing in common. We never once, in all the years I knew him, had a sensible conversation. My boys did better. They took him fishing ~ though that could get hairy. They were better fishermen. They caught more. They caught them bigger ~ & invariably they were right about the best places to drop a line.
In the middle of the night ~ & seriously, I have no idea why the Holy Spirit chooses these times!~ I was woken & what the Holy Spirit was reminding me of was a Katherine Mansfield short story: At The Bay. It is a long rambling short story about nothing much & which is read for literary style rather than plot ~ completely forgettable in many ways except for a delightful cameo wherein the child, Kezia, attempts to get her grandmother to promise to never die. And that was what the Holy Spirit reminded me about. [You can read the story here; part VII is the relevant episode ]
And so this is the story that leapfrogs into a discussion about life & death & the starting point the Holy Spirit chose to lead into a discussion about what my boys discussed with their grandfather during those long hours on the water & what he, himself, finally came to believe. GM is happy with it. The MOTH is happy. I am happy to have successfully managed a delicate balancing act between the secular & the religious.
Just the same, we are all going to be very glad when this week is done & dusted.
Again, my condolences to all the family. No matter how things were, they will never again be. It is still hard on family to adjust to the change, even when the person was a difficult one.
ReplyDeleteI am thinking we will be going through the same not too far in the future, but the difference is the Queen Mother has very few friends, most of them are far away, and has made little impact on the lives of other people. She did not have a funeral for her husband, who was more popular, nor even a memorial and probably expects the same.
Thanks Seeking. We will catch up eventually. At present it is just difficult ~ for many reasons other than grief. ♥
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