Jesus (Not Christmas Jesus)

Jesus Lord! <---one of my grandma's famous swears I am feeling what is colloquially known as "spread too thin." What a great idiom. It's so evocative, and when you're spread too thin that's exactly how you feel--like your attention and your energy are expanded out to an impossible circumference, such that at any given moment only the most translucent and wimpy amount can be devoted to any one task or thought. My grandma had what was universally considered to be great timing in terms of when she died. Everybody could make it to the funeral; my aunt and myself were in between the semester and finals, with no course prep to do; it wasn't over a holiday; the cousins had all just been down there the week before for Thanksgiving so they'd gotten to see her while she was still sort of arguably alive; and also it meant their spouses didn't feel that obligated to come down again, so they all just ditched their families and hopped on planes, and it was thus OLD SCHOOL and quite frankly so much more fun than if there had been a million people and small children around. I slept in a bed with Mavis, with my little 24 year old "blessing" cousin/Mavis' half-sister on the floor next to us, just like in bygone days waiting for Santa Claus. Except instead of presents under a tree we woke up to our grandmother's funeral, but no matter! I saw a picture of my grandmother dying and then one of her dead, and I watched a video of her dying (the way dying people breathe is INTENSE. You read about it but seeing it in action is different. It's like the body is an automaton, with air being forcefully jammed into it at absurdly long intervals, much longer intervals than any human would go without breathing. But she wasn't on life support! That's just how your body breathes as it's winding down), but I could not bring myself to watch the video Mavis had taken of her having scary seizures before they started the morphine. This surprised me, as I have a macabre sensibility and pride myself on being tough and calloused when it comes to talking about death. My mom watched the video and it made her cry and then I just couldn't do it. My grandma looked very happy to be dead though, I must say. Her worry-lines were gone. She looked peaceful. The funeral was basically 100 times less depressing than my grandfather's was. At my grandfather's, I felt like there was hardly anyone there, and everyone who WAS there was 100 years old and seemed like they were about to just melt into the floor they were so withered and ancient and impossibly frail and confused. Also, at my grandfather's funeral, we still had my grandma, who was in diapers and could barely walk and didn't know who anyone was, and kept asking "Was I a good wife to Paw-Paw?" and "did Paw-Paw die in the bed with me?" over and over again (FUCK). This time around, the sense of lightness and relief was PALPABLE. The same ancient old people were all there, but this time they seemed wonderful instead of horrifying. Honestly you have not lived until you have been examined by a bunch of 90 year old small-town high-society Texans who knew your mother when she was a tiny child. There was the man named "Doggie" who was one of my grandpa's best friends and who told me a lot about Massachusetts. There was the woman named Marcy who was about 4 feet tall, 92 years old, wearing a gaudy quilted jacket, with her jet-black dyed hair done up in a big bouffant, who hugged me and then said "Honey I can't keep standing here talking to you, because I've got real bad feet? So I need to go sit down." There was my grandpa's 80 year old cousin Shirley who told me about reading Betty Friedan in 1968 and divorcing her husband and joining NOW, like what the fuck, where has this woman been my entire life?? There were a lot of roars of laughter during the funeral. My mom opened her remarks by saying that when she was in junior high she never wanted to go out and be social, and my grandma would say "you better go make some friends or nobody's going to come to your funeral!" Gales of laughter. The most enigmatic remarks generated waves of knowing chuckles. "My mother would have LOVED this funeral." "My grandmother knew what she wanted." "Anna was a strong-willed woman." I was thinking about how everyone in this town is obsessed with sand dollars. Many of you probably don't even know what a sand dollar is, and yet I grew up completely preoccupied with them. Everyone covets them and thinks about them and decorates their christmas trees with them. TWO DIFFERENT SPEECHES at the funeral used sand dollars as a central image or metaphor. On the walk from the chapel to the column where you put the cremated dead people, the pastor was talking to my cousin enthusiastically about sand dollars. Then, while singing "The Old Rugged Cross," I looked down and noticed that the kneeling pillows in the church were all embroidered with sand dollars. I suddenly realized I wanted some of my grandmother's sand dollars but I don't know where any of them are. How can I not have any?? She probably had 1,000 of them all over her house in various tasteful glass vases and jars. I should get a small one gold-plated and wear it around my neck. NOW I AM THINKING LIKE HER. Also on this trip I finally realized, after 37 years of not really getting it, that my cousin Mavis GENUINELY liked my grandma and thought she was cool. Even during childhood, when I found her the most challenging! It took me so long to comprehend this. Our experience of her was so different. Mavis LOVED shopping with her, for example, whereas that experience remains one of my most pivotal primal scenes of trauma or whatever. We discussed how our different experiences of our grandmother are indicative of the differences between our personalities. I felt sort of guilty but also I felt the inevitability of character, like how impossible it is to change who you fundamentally are. How I could not be expected at age 10 to have circumspection about myself and my relationship with my grandmother and yet how it would have been cooler if I had. Later we had drinks and went around in a circle saying nice things about her and it IMMEDIATELY, like within one person, devolved into telling stories of insane horrible things she had said/done across the many decades of our collective experiences with her. Mavis kept trying to get us back on track. It was sort of emo but also very funny. I feel like honesty is more useful/meaningful than falsity when it comes to people dying. The thing where somebody dies and immediately becomes this wonderful saint who brought joy wherever she went; I don't like that, if it isn't true. I wanted to think about my grandmother collectively as a whole person, good and bad. I would have liked the funeral to have even sharper stories about her. What a difficult mother she was. How frustrating she could be. I would have liked to get up there and talk about the blind date she made me go on, all the times she made Mavis cry by intentionally giving her clothes that were two sizes too small and then telling her to "give them to one of your skinny friends," all the times she made me cry by using the n-word. Because she made an impact on my life, even through these less glowing anecdotes. She helped me figure out who I was in a lot of ways. And, in light of how awful she could be, I think it makes her incredible generosity and helpfulness at other times that much more touching. To think that this self-centered, loud, insane woman nonetheless had it in her to see that someone needed help; someone was suffering; and to be in those moments extraordinarily selfless and gentle...I find that interesting and lovely, much lovelier than if we all pretend she was that way all the time, which, come on. I think her faults make the good stuff about her more interesting. It makes me feel cynical and destructive to just hear everyone say "she was WONDERFUL" when we all know that she wasn't, or at least, that in addition to the aspects of her that were wonderful, there were aspects of her that made all of us cry and scream (literally) at various points over the past 60 years. She and my grandfather did not like each other, for example. They quite cartoonishly did not like each other. And yet there was so much talk of them being together in Heaven at last and I find that annoying. And then you march down to the columbarium thing my grandfather paid $10,000 for two spots in, and it's like awkwardly opened up, so the nice marble slab with everyone's name on it is just sort of leaned against the wall and there's this bare brutal metal shelf with slots in it, and the box holding my grandpa is in there right where we left him three years ago, and then my mom and my aunt slide my grandma in there, and the dumbass pastor makes a joke about doing their funeral next, and that was that, the end of my grandma. THEN I get on a plane and fly all the way back across the damn country, and get home at 9:30 at night and have to give my first final at 9 a.m. the next day. This final was crazy. I am already scheming to see if I can choose not to give a final in this class or if I am required to. We have to reserve the huge auditorium on campus that holds 500 people. We rent these boards that students have to use as desks. We have to put all the kids who get "accommodations" through disability services because they can't read or whatever up in the balcony and then try to keep people quiet down below. We have to book a bunch of live performances because that's what the final is about, so then of course the dancers show up 45 minutes late when we are all getting frantic, or some such nonsense. Meanwhile I have lost all my notes, all the things I needed to remember to announce to the students during the test, so I'm like crouched on the floor frantically whispering with my course admin who's wildly manipulating the iPad trying to re-look-up all the information we looked up to write my notes the first time around. I'm backstage whispering to the jazz band things like "only do the head twice and make sure to give a good obvious break before you start trading fours" and then I'm racing back to the front of the hall to make sure we'll all set for picking up the finals. At last it is over, and me and all my TAs take the huge boxes of finals back to my office, where we have ordered sandwiches. After eating, we then graded the entire thing, using an assembly line method not unlike the one with which Henry Ford transformed modern capitalism. We each take one section of the final and just grade it, 220 times. It is awful, but the fastest way to get it done. We graded for 6 straight hours without stopping and we still didn't finish; I have to go in this afternoon to finish my section, and I have no idea how everyone else is doing with theirs. It started out fun, with us reading funny student answers to one another. By hour 5 it was no longer fun. People were muttering swears under their breath; we had a "peaceful ambient" playlist playing on spotify; somebody was trying to get a friend to bring us 8 coffees. That thing where you stare at a sentence without being able to read it. One of my TAs suddenly realized that after 5 hours of grading the photography section, he'd suddenly started trying to grade the classical music section, and it took him forever to realize why he was so confused. "Harmony? Melody? What's wrong with this kid" I got home at 8 and made chili. Checked my email, got a note from someone I'm putting together an edited volume with telling me she has too much work to do and can't deal with it right now, and I'm in such a dark spot that my first reaction was just "THANK GOD" Now I will grade all my papers (as distinguished from the final. Yes that's right we had the students turn in a paper in addition to taking the final, because we are very smart). My husband just walked into the kitchen and said "you look like a crazy person" I brought home four of my grandmother's christmas tree ornaments, and two painted glass candlesticks that belonged to my great-grandmother. My heirloom situation is sort of weird and sad. My mom is always offering me amazing heirlooms and I either never have anywhere to put them, or no way to transport them. "Honey do you want the rock-maple vanity table that my grandparents got when they got married?" "NO THANKS" wtf, of course I want it, but like, if I said "yes" it would entail my parents having to transport it back to their already over-stuffed house and keeping it indefinitely for me until I can rent a truck and go down there and drive it back or something. So instead all the heirlooms keep going to my mother's cousins and I end up just grabbing something random like these candlesticks which I have literally never seen before in my life. What am I doing?? I'm doing so many things wrong; so many things I know I'll later regret. But how do I change my situation? Everything constantly feels up in the air but I am almost 40 and shouldn't things stop feeling that way by now? I need to meditate or something.