Things I learned from traveling home unexpectedly:
- You can live your entire life as you want—to include conducting significant portions in an excessively self-centered manner—but you might find your gravesite way short on the living before you’ve even been lowered into the ground.
- I don’t get home nearly as often as I’d like, but I find that it is still possible to have an impact on the youngest members of my family. Even leaving the tiniest of imprints on their ephemeral recollections makes me somehow reassured that my own cosmic imprint is worthwhile.
- My father and mother, although decades divorced and enjoy peaceful lives apart, remain positively muddled in spillover business of each other’s lives. In short, divorce is a bullshit term.
- Why I’m saying this: Last week my mother helped select the casket of a relation that was traced from my father’s side. My father, meanwhile, refrained from participating but is working on a completely different casket endeavor. Which leads me to my next point:
Since this project is not my father’s first go at economizing death, I’m thinking of suggesting that he open up an Etsy storefront to bring in more clientele. I don’t want to actually suggest this though because I’m petrified of what he might name his shop.- Traveling back home yet staying on a European time zone has its advantages. By waking up in the predawn dark you get hours and hours of gorgeous silence in which to sort your shit out before the rest of the day joins you.
- There is beauty to be found in a twelve minute burial service.
Feelings can be impossible to translate into a thought of zero contradictions.- And now back to the casket, because really that’s the image staying with me from Friday morning’s service. Don’t build, buy or shove me into a casket. Burn my dead ass up and hand me out to a bunch of people who’ll be willing to take me on one last adventure. I don’t want to take up precious (and costly) real estate in a ground somewhere; I want to be in the wind, mixed up with the sea, and passed off of as topsoil amongst pitch pines or ruddy green hills.
- You can claim to be the planet’s most staunchly self-sufficient introvert…but at the end of the day, you can’t make it without your People.
Reliable and sentient on-site support is absolutely essential when you’re a person who lives in a place far removed from your People. Having friends, allies, and co-workers like this allows you to feign functionality even when they know deep down that your foundation is currently weathering the world’s most drawn-out and insufferable earthquake.- Toddlers who announce that they have to take a leak as soon as a graveside service commences demonstrates that these mini adults are masters of comic relief.
- There’s no right or wrong way to feel about anything. In the case of this past week writ large, you can choose to grieve how you want, and no one can criticize you for that.
The ocean, the distinctive accents, and the everyday sounds you don’t pick up on but do subconsciously internalize are all indicators that let you know you’re home and everything is okay. Routine check-ins to spend time treading in these nuances are so important.- I have the best and most varied array of support structures that I could possibly ask for. If you don’t have people who get you, then you’re screwed.
Back to London. The day is well in hand.