~ the museum in town ~

8:08 a.m.

We shingled half the shop roof at Grandma’s yesterday. My great-aunt Vera was out in her garden across the alley, and we met halfway to chat. She asked me how Mom is feeling, and I told her, and that Mom has been enjoying all the phone calls and visits and cards she’s been getting.

“Everybody loves her,” Aunt Vera said matter of factly, in a way that suggested Mom is a community darling.

 
~ a crib made of wire! who knew? ~

Grandma’s neighbour died last week. He and his wife are in their nineties. He’s been in poor health for years and his wife has been looking after him, but is infirm herself. Every time he had to go to the hospital, she had to be admitted as well.

“How is Mrs. B doing?” I asked.
“Oh, she’s doing all right I guess,” Grandma said. “Crying all the time though! I don’t know why she has to cry so much. She cried for three days after he died!”

Her husband just died, and Grandma thinks it’s overreacting to be upset for several days?

I said, “Everyone responds differently to a death.”

“Oh, I know! But it’s not like she didn’t know it was coming.” Grandma chuckled. “There were plenty of times over the years when she said she’d like to kill him herself. He used to drink, you know, and she’d go looking for him. She had a hard life with him. I wouldn’t have wanted it.”

Somewhere during the course of this conversation I said that a lot of tears after a death are not a sign of weakness, that people have different degrees of sensitivity and do not all cope with their emotions in the same way, or even have the same emotions. You never know how you will react, even if you think you are prepared.

Karen was there and I thought she looked at me funny when I said that. Maybe she read this journal when I felt like a weakling for crying all the time in the weeks following Mom’s diagnosis of terminal cancer. Maybe I’m harder on myself than I am on others. Maybe I’m a devil’s advocate.

~ plaster & log chicken coop, museum ~