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I use humor to cope. You'll excuse me. If I cannot laugh about something, than I obviously cannot deal with it.
This has not diminished with time. I tried to explain this tendency to a potential therapist once -- I have reason enough to have cause -- and he was horrified.
He was not placated and a little affronted when I pointed out that it is a coping strategy because it helps me to cope, so it is not pathological.
He was far from the right therapist.
So, my grandmother, Gramma Louise just died.
Just is physically, but not spiritually, accurate. Given her senility and dementia, our grandmother died in fractions for years as she lived with Aunt Judy. She lost herself until what died was only a shadow, having mislaid her substance.
I fear death, but I fear more the slow shaving to dust of who I was.
There is going to be another funeral. And another wake. She is going to be cremated, I think.
When you get to the funeral, there is only a brick into which her ashes were... poured? Shaped? Was she in the brick, or was she the substance of the brick?
You feel unsatisfied and unresolved about this, as though her body might be in a casket before cremation, but what more had you to say to her? She was your childhood babysitter, always tiny and old (though I cannot say she was as old as you imagined at 4). I can remember her voice, her face, the smell of her basement, that you would roll around on a dolly there, that she always had cans of Pepsi in her refrigerator. I remember the marbles for Chinese Checkers kept in a cookie tin in her closet. A lot faded from me as the years elapsed, but I could still draw a blueprint of her home and yard.
I cannot say it is better for you that you lost contact with her as she began to descend, but it preserved who you wanted her to be.
I didn't love Todd, ever, except as a person. I loved my grandmother.
Given how closely your grandmother's death came at the heels of Todd's suicide, you were doubly shaky in dealing with it. The gulf between the deaths could not have been more pronounced if written by a hack; the only similarity between them was their smallness and the scratchy timber of their voices, my grandmother's earned by age and not by being a young gay man given to shouting.
My mother says that Gramma Louise was so full of morphine during her final time that she barely knew what was going on. I do not totally believe this. No matter how demented (clinically, not colloquially) one is, I think they always know what is happening on some level.
You underestimate the power of morphine. Grandma Louise surely drifted to oblivion without a care. Five years ago, one of our friends -- you and I don't have many people I would call our friends, as people don't last in our lives -- died from a heroin overdose. At the time, I tortured myself by looking up how gross she must have been when her fiance found her. I concluded that it was likely that she just fell into a favored dream until her body stopped.
I am not implying that one's body being overwhelmed with opiates is a good death, but it is as close to a pleasant one as one can get.
I think the death should end now. But I am scared it won't. Like three deaths are needed? I don't know.
No. And yes. No one you know personally dies in the next couple of months, long enough that you cannot mark it as a pattern.
And, yes, many thousands will die and disillusion you forever in a way a suicidal twenty-year-old and a senile seventy-year-old never could.
No one else in my life should have to die, because I only have so much composure before I lose it.
You will be impressed at how much your composure can take and how little, often the latter because of the former. You can take a ton of psychic trauma and make a joke. Then you can feel a friend slighted you in a social interaction and become a histrionic mess. It is an aspect of your mental illness, but you crumble in private.
More death to deal with, this time family members and wakes I can't avoid and lawyers and such.
You go to her wake, but I do not know why you think you would have anything to do with a lawyer.
My father wanted me to send an e-mail to Dan's phone, telling him of the loss since we cannot get through to him. I filled out the address part and wrote "Grandma" and was stumped for the rest. My father was standing behind me and wondered how we should phrase it. My mother suggested from her bed, "has ceased to function." So we all broke up at her irreverence and I suggested, "has been deactivated and is no longer one with the Borg." Humor, you see. Must be genetic.
Yes, you didn't acquire coping strategies in a vacuum. You learned and earned them.
My mother was discussing how long my grandmother has been declining. She said, "two years ago. Remember? Graduation."
I do not remember this and wish you had explained it further since it would be closer to you. If I try now to reach back, I will imagine something until I believe it might be true. Memory is fallible and malleable. I don't want to shape a false memory of her.
You know what is worse? Graduation parties. I do not think I will ever attend another without stigma.
No, those are fine. You like celebrating transitions and, perhaps because of the more significant issues you will find in months, you do not retain any negative attachments to these parties.