Last week, not even, last Saturday was a memorial for my grandfather, Henry Lewis Stadler.
I didn’t think I was going to be that moved by the occasion but when my grandmother suddenly asks me to say something (which was kind of not ok, even though I said it was) I found myself much less able to speak than I had expected.
I feel like it wasn’t even entirely true what I was saying. I mean, it was true, in that we did talk about what I was going to do, and he did encourage me to go and do it, to some extent, but not in the way I was imagining as I struggled to say the words I did. I feel now like I failed to really communicate what I was thinking in the way that I had wanted to.
This ties in a little bit with the conversation I had with my father the following day about how at memorials and during eulogies and other such occasions, people are made out to be saints, doing no wrong. Of course it’s not that we want to remember people by their misdeeds but nonetheless I feel like usually those are conveniently omitted at this kind of gathering.
Nonetheless, it was a strange experience for me to be sitting there surrounded by family and friends and hearing about my grandfather’s life in a way that I hadn’t really heard before. My own experience with him was in many ways both profoundly different from the people there (that is, different from the people who knew him when he was young) but also very much the same (the way I saw his later life and other people did was not so different).
Henry is for me the first person close to me who has died. I’ve still never been to a funeral, for that matter. I guess in that sense the whole experience has caused me to consider my own mortality in a way I never did before. Is that such a big leap to make? It makes me uncomfortable to think about my life having concluded and though I hope that it’s a long way off, I ‘d like to be able to consider it differently as I get closer.
1 response so far ↓
1 jerry // Dec 4, 2008 at 4:46 pm
Sorry for your loss. It’s been about six years since I lost my grandfather to brain cancer. The few memories I have of spending time with my grandfather were nothing but fond.
I’ve never had to speak at a funeral, but I can see how eulogies and celebrating the life of a person may be disjoint from one’s personal feelings. With the loss of a person, I don’t think anyone’s kneejerk reaction is “let’s celebrate this person’s achievements.” It’s mourning of personal loss, selfish or otherwise.
Mortality is always a sobering topic, but I imagine when I’m old and senile, then I will be able to try and ponder the mysteries of the universe.
Sometimes I think about life without the deep thinking — the people who work their day jobs and end the week nights with worldly distractions, rinse and repeat. Other times I think a little larger scale and consider the life of the impoverished and those who suffer, so far removed from intellectual, artificial distractions like THE SOCIAL WEB and HEDGE FUNDS and BRANGELINA. Perhaps these people go through life worrying about the next meal, from the moment they can work till their last days.
With that perspective in mind, I feel pretty lucky to be dabbling in my intellectual distractions, sharing my feelings and being able to sit at a screen and type stuff to keep the electricity on and put food on my table.
See you around.
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