Funerals Bring Up All Manner of Things...

 The last two weeks have been marked by tiredness and a stomach virus. I genuinely felt at one point like a rolling bio hazard. As someone reminded me, stress, whether good or bad, takes its toll, so I guess I should not have been surprised. The last three years have been tumultuous and marked by departures, some of them stunning. While most of us would associate that particular descriptor with something beautiful, it also most aptly describes events over which we have little to no control and which often can bring us to our knees, metaphorically if not otherwise.

My aunt's death was sudden, but a good one, in that she died peacefully at home surrounded by people who cared for her. In addition to her expertise at cultivating flowers and gardens, she cultivated a vast social network that by the end of her life included friends, members of her religious community, those in the regional and state arts scene, politicians, academics and a host of others from varied walks of life.

Seated at the end of a pew surrounded by about five hundred and representatives of the local media, I reflected not only on her life but my own. Like this aunt, I suffer no shortage of opinions and tend toward generosity. Though Lacking the physical prowess to grow and nurture flowers and food, I nonetheless have a healthy respect for those who do and have always enjoyed being outside.

As a kid, I loved the beach, parks and camping and it was a particular joy to me to teach   camping, hiking and rowing skills to younger children in my teens, despite a lifelong disability. Also like this aunt in her youth, I often nurtured younger children, sometimes as a teen baby sitter, intermittently as a visiting cousin and as a volunteer, and then as a young teacher, though I never seriously desired children of my own. Teaching was short-lived and my work life evolved around writing and editing with other things thrown in, pushing me into the creative world. As a librarian much later, I was often front and center when it came to dealing with folks of all ages, backgrounds and foibles.

Unlike my aunt, however, I eschew the limelight. I am an introvert with all of the characteristics that now much-bandied term suggests.  A loner by inclination,  I frequently find crowds almost intolerable. Though I've schooled myself in the art of the poker face and often appear to others to be comfortable talking with anyone, these are skills my professional life forced upon me. While I am grateful to have developed these abilities, true happiness is generally found in the peace of my bed, book in hand. A cup of tea and my cats also figure prominently in such a scenario.

While introverted persons are often mistakenly labeled as being shy, something I have never been, I am very selective to whom I speak and what I reveal and do not trust easily, traits developed as a result of being part of a family that used any personal piece of information about another as potential ammunition and fodder for comparison. As a younger person, I learned quickly to keep my mind on my schoolwork at home, do my chores, be polite and reveal next to nothing of my deepest dreams to either parent. The fact that they and I saw the world differently was down to being a teen, in their view. That  my perspective broadened as the result of travels and experiences entirely different from theirs did not come into the matter. Neither did my gender or the fact of my disability nor the time and environment in which we lived. Such epic shortsightedness, common for both was, unfortunately, more solidly entrenched in my mother, a woman whose view of herself as a parent differed radically from my own.

She seemed to have a love-hate relationship with her extended family, and myriad issues with her own mother made my getting to know those beyond my grandparents harder than it should have been. Such are the vagaries of family dynamics. Then, there was the matter of geography, the forming of relationships with step-siblings, the medical and therapeutic issues in my childhood and other less salubrious events. By the time I reached high school, a sense of "otherness" dominated my immediate horizon, something it took me years to understand and a situation I still encounter today as a woman with a chair. Sitting at the end of pew with a bird's eye view of a cousin's collar left me wondering whether the capable woman that I have become should feel differently about this family...I have no feeling of belonging anywhere or with anyone, merely being here and wondering why.

Until Next Time...