Partings of Various Descriptions

 We are back from Thunder Bay and I have spent a couple of days just reading and trying to survive the heat. First of all, I want to thank Tudor (HI TUDOR) for her wise and helpful suggestions on my last post, both of which I am following immediately. I also want to thank Pat for telling me I will stop being sad - even if it feels wholly untrue, it is the kind of thing that is good to hear. And everyone else for sympathy and commiseration. I talked to Jody (HI JODY) as she drove home from Montreal after dropping off Davis at McGill and, well, there was snot in copious and bountiful amounts.

Eve's BFF since day one of JK was supposed to fly to Vancouver (many provinces away) on Thursday with her family to get settled in for a week or so before starting drama school. We dropped Eve off on the way home from the airport near midnight, with her suitcase, so she could join the good-bye party when we landed and Eve turned her phone back on, her friends had sent a picture of the plane flying over Marianna's house and the friends screaming up at the sky.) There was Netflix-watching and carousing and laughter and screaming and very little sleep, with souvlaki. And then the flight got cancelled. So then Marianna was there for Davis's goodbye party which, refer back to the carousing and screaming and very little sleep, with shawarma, which got sent home with Marianna because her mom had cleaned out the fridge and sent all the souvlaki home with other people and then they were delayed for three days with zero food in the house. Then there was one more good-bye party for Marianna, and then she actually got on a plane that actually left today, which is good because they are all punchy from lack of sleep and if there was any more good-bye partying they might lose the ability to be friends anymore (Eve: "this one wasn't even sad. She's overstayed her welcome, it's time to go.")

Leavin' on a jet plane. Maybe.

Barb's memorial was pretty much everything we wanted, which meant it was a wonderful family reunion that she would have very much enjoyed attending - so yeah, it was everything we wanted minus the person being dead. There were funny stories and lovely poems and many tears and a lot of laughs, and a truly prodigious amount of Chinese food (plus Bill said he needed a Brinks truck for his payment for the alcohol).

After the interment, the daughters and granddaughters were supposed to go through the closet in the spare room full of Barb's wraps and purses and clothing. This initially sounded kind of distasteful to me in a 'casting lots for the clothing' way, but it ended up being a really lovely thing - everything reminded us so much of her even while much of it was perfect for someone else, so it felt like she had picked things out for us unconsciously. Stuff that looked perfect on short, white-haired Barb inexplicably also looked like it was made for tall, svelte, red-haired Sam (HI SAM), which was weird and wonderful. I was very happy with my Coach wallet and scarlet Roots bag, but then I pulled a pair of Chapters fleecy reading socks from a bottom drawer and started laughing because this was the one item of clothing that would fit me. Then I said "oh shit, I wonder if I bought her these and she never used them (the tag was still on)" and Sam said slightly disconsolately "no, that was me", and I would have felt bad for her, but like I said, tall, gorgeous, red-haired, once cooked for Lady Gaga, she'll be okay. Eve found a dress that she wore to the memorial next day.

Now we're in a breakneck countdown to both kids leaving for school. Eve and I hit a couple of stores yesterday and got most of the stuff she needs for her room. She commented on how weird it is trying to gather up all the stuff that you usually have all over your whole house and then picturing finding space for all of it in a single room. Angus said we should watch a movie tonight and picked Stillwater - I went in blind, and was startled by the fact that it seemed to be loosely (VERY loosely, like attached in the least secure manner ever) based on the Amanda Knox story. I actually thought it was a really good movie, references to the real world aside, and we also enjoyed looking up the similarities to the actual case afterwards and coming across statements such as "the movie keeps some details but adds a hot French lady and Matt Damon in MAGA drag". 

The last couple of weeks have been a strange whirlwind. Gathering with more people than I have in a year and a half. Mourning and rejoicing. Hugging Marianna good-bye once and then twice and then for the third and final time. Crying in the car. Crying in the grocery store. Hearing Matt Damon say "ma'am" a whole bunch of times. Seeing Eve having dinner with Davis in the McGill cafeteria on Facetime. Crying at the bakery (goddammit, those bakery people are SO  nice, and that is NOT WHAT I NEED RIGHT NOW). The circle of life is literally smacking me in the face right now, and because it's a circle that means it smacks me OVER and OVER and OVER again. An oblong or rectangle of life would probably feel less violent. 

We got upgraded on the last leg of our flight, because of Matt's status (he flies a bajillion miles for work in a normal year, he figures they got a ping that he was flying again and said "whoo-hoo, this guy is worth fifty grand a year!") and probably because they wanted to fit more standby people in. The flight was only 45 minutes, but was delayed significantly waiting for people from other flights, and waiting in our twenty-five-percent bigger seats with fancy snacks did not suck. Angus and Eve sat together a few rows ahead of us, and I will leave you with Angus's contribution to the group text, because it is funny and no matter how sad I am I have a pathological need to end on a laugh. 

Raging Against the Dying of the Light and Various Other Things

 I keep trying to put off blogging until I feel like I can be funny again. I do not feel like I can be funny again. My mother-in-law's memorial is next week-end and we're going to Thunder Bay and I keep feeling like we're going to visit her, and then remembering she's not going to be there. We've been going through pictures for a slideshow which is a really great way to remember how much we loved her and how much it sucks that she's dead. I recognize that it is a gift that I had a mother-in-law who was such a great friend. I'm happy that we will be together with people who also miss her after we've all spent the year grieving separately. It's just all kinds of wrong that we buried her mother at 95 just a couple of years before we lost her at barely 70 (which sounds churlish, in a way - 70 would have sounded like a perfectly fortunate crack at life when I was younger. We want too much. We are given an embarrassment of riches and we still want more. In some ways it seems like the only way to human.)

Eve snoozing on Nana Barb

Also, Eve is moving almost five hours away to university on September first. I went almost five hours away to university also (the same university, which has not stopped being weird). I always expected I would and I sort of expected that my kids would too. Now that I am faced with the unforgiving reality of the situation, I have morphed unwillingly into a massive, inescapable, mortifying cliché. I am bereft. I am heartbroken. I am rending garments and howling into the void - metaphorically, I mean. In reality I am mostly sitting staring into space wondering if this is the part of my life where I just sit very still until I wither away into some powdery substance and blow away on the passing wind. 

Do you get it? Nicole and Hannah will get it, if no one else does

I was drawn unwillingly into scrapbooking quite a few years ago. Once I got into it it was addictive, though, and I loved it, but I was doing it on the dining room table and that whole corner of the table and room was getting increasingly paper-strewn and cluttered. So I moved everything downstairs where there's a table and a set of shelves I could put everything on. But I didn't like having to go down to the basement to do it, and then Angus moved his bedroom down there, so I felt like I was disturbing him. Once I had the fleeting though "well when he leaves for university I'll have the basement to myself again" and immediately I was stricken and sad and hated the thought of selecting and displaying pictures of my sweet-faced goofy kids while said kids were fully grown and fled, and I thought fuck that, I'll just never scrapbook again. (To be perfectly honest, there was also a moment in the show Dexter that inexplicably took the wind out of my enthusiastic cropping and dry-embossing sails: Dexter's hard-boiled sister Deb crosses paths with another cop who tells her that she should get a hobby outside of policing, like maybe scrapbooking, which is described as "the tradition of putting photos and memorabilia into family keepsake albums, with relevant journaling". Which, I mean, that's exactly what it was, and yet the bald description of it somehow made me feel like a giant schmo (Shut UP, Other Cop, it's a way of expressing CREATIVITY and INDIVIDUALITY. Later on Deb takes down a perp and yells "I'm a cop! That's all I need! I'm not going to do any fucking scrapbooking!" and it's very funny but somehow made me question all my life and Innovative Layout choices.) Anyone want 900 sheets of acid-free paper and some flower stickers?

Similarly, last night I was reading a paper book instead of an ebook and I opened my bedside table drawer to grab a bookmark and was reminded that last time I started on one of my cleaning-and-organizing tears, which are effective (if a little frightening) but never last quite long enough, I stopped just before cleaning out my bedside table drawer, which really, really needs to be cleaned out. "After Eve is gone I'll have time to get to that" was my first thought, closely followed by "I DON'T WANT A FUCKING CLEAN AND WELL-ORGANIZED HOUSE THAT MY CHILDREN DON'T LIVE IN, I WANT TO LIVE IN SQUALOR WHILE COMPLAINING THAT MY KIDS WON'T LEAVE". It's a pretty well-acknowledged fact in our immediate friend group that I coddle my kids the most, and yet they're the only ones going away to university. How did those other assholes managed to co-dependent their kids into living at home for school and mine are swanning off into a world that I have left them ill-equipped to deal with? Angus has managed insultingly well, all things considered. Hmph.

This is usually the part (I think) where I say "it's okay". And of course, it is a little bit okay. And a lot not okay, and (ah fuck) that's okay. People are going to die and we're going to be sad about that. Kids should leave home eventually, and it's probably good that I'm not rejoicing over it. This is where I am in my life right now and there's no way out but through. 

I did absolutely kick ass going head to head with a Facebook fat-shaming troll last week, so when I feel like being funny again I'll tell you about that.