This isn’t the first time that a loved one has passed away… Knock on wood, this will be the last for some time… But this is the first time that I’ve been involved in the process of planning a service. Thankfully my grandmother had something of a morbid streak, so the basics were covered and paid for over a decade ago.
Unfortunately, she was also very private. We don’t know who her friends were, and she explicitly did not want an obituary published (newspapers end up lining birdcages)… So at the moment it looks like only my mother and I will be attending the funeral, and that depresses the hell out of me. It might be that this is what she wanted but there’s no way for us to know now.
I’m trying to get in touch with her local Veterans group, I think that she had a few buddies there. Veterans were a big part of her life; she met her husband at an event for returning soldiers from the Second War, and her brother served in Korea. Whenever I visited she always had a story about how some Veteran had recently helped her with some thing…
Update: There are a lot of VFW and American Legion posts in South Jersey. Everyone I’ve spoken to has been very friendly but no luck yet.
The funeral director keeps asking me about having a priest at the service. She’d told him that she was an atheist, but the last time he’d seen her while she was lucid he remembers that she’d blessed herself (he’s also the executor of her estate, so his visits aren’t as morbid as they might seem — or maybe they are). Her funeral plans are explicit that there should be no religious services, but… She’s 100% Polish, was raised Catholic, and so far as I know her relationship with God only soured due to the extended suffering her husband experienced before death.
I’m not inclined to go against her written wishes without more substantial evidence, and surprisingly enough my mother feels the same, but… I keep wondering if she might have finally made peace with her Maker, if it’s a mistake for us not to give God the benefit of the doubt on this occassion.
My brother has been entirely unhelpful. I’d begged him to come with us, to ease some of the burden for me and give our mother another shoulder to cry on. I offered a sizable bribe, and since he doesn’t like flying, suggested that he talk to mom about taking the train. He turned around and presented this package as if I were trying to beg out of being around her, promised to provide a sizable amount of misery on the trip up, and whole thing ended with me at work trying to diffuse a mother in tears over the phone.
When I left work I was ready to threaten him with an unloaded firearm and pistolwhip him into a bloody pulp. Good sense might have prevailed in the end, but since he wasn’t home we’ll never really know.
I remember last year my brother witnessed some of my long-term grudge holding and wondered what it took to earn such internal rage from someone who is ordinarily Mr. Nice-Guy-To-A-Fault… Probably never expected to figure it out by earning one of his own. I had been the one member of our immediate family that unconditionally liked him. Now he should just be happy that my urge to kill him has passed…
