And Then "So-And-So" Went Up and Died on Us

Being a young, spry thirty-something with lived-in experiences and currently considering myself to be "pretty good on a micro level," I hardly expected grief to come crashing into my dermatology appointment. There are many factors to the condition of our integumentary system, one of them stress. Without giving away too much HIPAA pertinent information, I found myself losing my voice and the tears welling up when I tried relaying that I thought my issues began around the time my college friend died. Hot damn, it's been ten years. 

It has actually been eight years (I am both terrible at math and remembering how old I am), and this experience came about in the heels of my recent visit to my grandpa who is ninety-two years. While I am thankfully fresh to the funerals and people dying, he has lived years I have not and many more of them. Certain aspects of life you can only experience with said many more years. 

A few times in catching up with my grandpa, he and his wife would be in some story and all of a sudden they would say in unison, "And then So-And-So went up and died on us." It was kind of like an inside joke and a way to acknowledge the normalcy of it all at their age. Perhaps also a tribute to their own lives and the gratitude to the time they have left. As someone the other day said to me and something my grandpa and his wife surely know is, "It won't be long before [they] take a permanent dirt nap." 

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My grandpa has since died, and after attending two of his remembrances, I do have a somewhat broader picture of death. He is the first grandparent to die in my adulthood, and I have maybe seen more of the other side of the coin. Familial relationships can make the business side of dying pretty hurtful. The dead can also add to the hurt and damage through the will and testament among other things. Death becomes us as funerals are for the living. 

And the living all have a different idea of how to remember and how to do it correctly (and who should pay for things). And unlike a wedding, there is no bride - the person of honor is dead. No one is fully in charge - the willingness "to wear a bird on my head if that's what the bride wants" is absent. And even if the dead made arrangements, pre-purchased a cemetery plot, or made wishes known, the dead are dead and everything is subjective, isn't it. 

For my grandpa's actual services, the aspect that was interesting was how the person that was being remembered was not the person I knew as my grandpa. And that detail was more than the tell-old story of how awkward it can be to get together with different groups of friends for the first time or even trying to be respectful of the dead. It shed a little bit more light on what I already knew - that our relationship was not a priority and that he was not what I would categorize as a good person, father, or grandfather. I suppose it didn't mean that he didn't love me, but he simply preferred to chase his own ego. 

Many of the stories that people from different times of his life were told with a fondness that made me realize how abusive relationships take hold. Or how different personalities handle situations differently or how what is acceptable or funny to one person absolutely is not to another. Or simply that I experienced a side of this person that this other person never saw. He liked to surround himself with people that admired and/or advanced him. 

And I guess, in that sense, the services successfully remembered him. "Ogres are like onions." People have layers. And honestly I believe there was closure for everyone including myself. That's why we have funerals, right? He lived his life the way he wanted and was blessed with not only time but also quality of time up until a year or so before the end. He was lucky in many ways. I'm glad he had people who loved him and will miss him and were able to honor his memory.

Nobody is perfect and we are all doing the best we can. We may be misguided at times, intentionally or not, but it all comes to an end in the physiological sense because we are all human. The lightness of jokingly telling friends, "Stay awesome and don't get murdered," or staring deeply into my dog's eyes and saying, "Don't you die on me!" or my grandpa and his wife being in the middle of a happy story exclaiming, "And then So-And-So went up and died on us," points to our humanness. There is an end for everyone and in the meantime we love, hurt, make mistakes, and hopefully listen, learn, grow, and have an opportunity to pass something along.