So after my dad’s family buried his sister on Friday, my mom loses her dad this past Sunday. It’s like being a rat in a fucked up experiment where I can propose hypotheses about mourning the loss of someone close and then experience it first hand. It really really sucks, and it hurts a lot.
The worst part about it is my grandmother. She has Alzheimer’s so each of my family members had to take turns consoling her as she learned of the loss of my grandfather. After the first dozen or so times I heard her learn the news I couldn’t take it anymore, so I went downstairs with the rest of my family. Eventually, no one else could take it either, so they got her to leave his body (he died in his sleep) and move down into the kitchen. It was okay for a while, but then she started asking why so many people were at her house, and we’d have to tell her again.
I try not to intentionally antagonize religion when I write, but I’m having some trouble resisting this morning. I stopped believing in deities and all that go along with them a long time ago, but I don’t let it bother me when others suppose about the existence of a supreme being. However, I find it difficult to swallow the argument that a loving god could exist and simultaneously allow a woman who had never done anything wrong to anyone to freshly mourn the loss of her husband of 62 years every 5 minutes or so. Can you even imagine the pain of looking around for your significant other and learning that they had died? Can you imagine having to go through that for the rest of your life, every moment spent in pain and loss and grief? Like I said, I don’t believe, and I think this is going to make it harder for me to listen to those who insist that something that loves us is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent.
And don’t give me any of that “mysterious ways” bullshit, because it’s a cop out. This woman is going through Hell.
Anyway, I was asked to write the obituary, so I just wanted to get that out of my system lest it end up in the newspaper.
