2002-07-04 - 14:48
here until i'm gone

You see, this is what happens.

At school, you have a routine. You do certain things every day. You are asked to write things, and you do, if you value your scholastic survival. In between, you have "free time" in which to do Whatever You Want. You bemoan the paucity of such time.

The best time to write something, of course, is when you are supposed to be writing something else. Hence, when essays are regularly assigned to you, you find yourself producing journal entries, long emails, fanfic and snarky opinion pieces with as much regularity.

Then the school year ends and you are set free. Your time is unstructured. You spend much of it out of the house. And, if you are a journal-keeper, you are probably wildly behind in your entries after the rush of finals, and the task of catching up is daunting. So you let it go another day, and then another.

See, a lot has happened to me since the last real update. It's hard to know where to start.

Mainly, my grandmother died.

I've tried to write about this here, but I get interrupted or derailed when I'm working on it. She died on April 27 and it's still a little hard to get a handle on the whole thing, for various reasons. I often told people in these past few years that she was staying alive out of sheer tenacity. I believe that's true, and I respected that in her. And if she decided that being alive wasn't working out for her anymore, I respect that too. She certainly stuck around a lot longer than any of us expected her to. One reason the whole thing is still a little strange for me is that after all those false ends, I was beginning to suspect on some level that she was never actually going to die. That's what too much science fiction will do to you.

I don't think I can go into it much more than that at the moment. It wasn't a surprise or a shock to lose her, not by any measure. It was the last step in a very long process for her. She was a bright and lively woman, and it was very hard for her to be unable to do the things she was used to doing for herself. The memorial held by her Quaker meeting was a very warm and loving celebration of her life, which do intend to talk about at greater length. Right now, though, my object is to bring this chronicle up to speed a little bit at a time.

While my grandmother was letting go of life in Oakland, I was marking the end of another school year in Portland by dancing and feasting with friends. Now, as I use a compact and impossibly complex machine to communicate with a potentially limitless number of people around the world, and as her husband slowly learns to do the same on the computer that he bought just days before she died, her body is in its final resting place in the UCSF medical center, either already in pieces or still waiting to be used by students of my generation for the furtherance of their learning.

Life, as they say, goes on.

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ob-la-di - 2003-05-18
not dead. - 2002-12-08