Debacle! Go on...ask me how my day was...I dare you! Having started out the day a little blurry-headed from last night's debauchery, I was not certain how it would go, but relatively certain that it would involve some sort of familial disaster or another. Surprise!

Today was the day of the interrment of my grandparent's ashes. It was an agreement that this would not be done for either of my grandparents until they had both passed away, I guess, so we ended up burying both of their little wooden boxes today, in my aunt's plot (I had an aunt who was killed in a car accident when she was nineteen....hence my middle-name-sake).

It's funny, though, because it was a day like this that really got me thinking about how we as society deal with death. I think most of us didn't know what to expect when it came to doing this task, although admittedly each of us, I'm sure, brought our own ideas of how to "do" things. But with my family, this is always an inevitability anyways-- that we all do our own thing, no matter how strange it is. But I realized that death and mourning as a conservative thing, is not necessarily the case after today. Well, at least that it shouldn't be.

It was sort of a bittersweet afternoon, actually. We all met at my aunt's plot (Summer...something cemetary--it's a very beautiful cemetary on the south side)in the brisk fall afternoon, milling about and being mindful of other gravesites as we talked heatedly about cat shows and other daily events, basically playing "catch-up" with everyone as we waited for things to unfold.

The day previous, my father had hired the caretaker to bore two holes about four feet in depth, into my aunt's grave. This cost seven hundred dollars apparently, and so, when we got there, there were these two very neat little holes and a small pile of dirt next to the headstone. Now, the caretaker was also supposed to be there to ummm...do the shovel bit, but he was a no-show, which later proved to be very amusing.

It was actually surprisingly emotional for all of us though, in varying levels. My red-eyed aunts, my stoned uncle and his constant reminders to everyone that he was a Catholic, my cousins trying to be mature and not be disrespectful, listening to Harlot's lecture on "cemetary etiquette", and laughing at my dad's non-chalant attitude towards the thing, my mom trying to keep the aunts calm, and me, not seeing anything that was going on, having been delegated to the back of the crowd that is my amazingly eccentric family gathering at the cemetary.

We ended up waiting there for quite a while in the chilly cold, for the caretaker to show up with a spade, and also for my tardy aunt and my stoned uncle. He with the pupils the size of pin pricks upon arriving. We passed the time with talks about the two new cats that my aunt Bird is getting, the new dog that Grace Kelly is getting, and the up and coming move to the boonies for Harlot (hence the dirt bike...her son needed a decent bribe for the malajustment that will later result from going to a new junior high school in the middle of a semester). Lots and lots of news, and of course, bantering about the dead, and how "quiet" the neighborhood was.

Again...the care taker did not show up. I imagined that he'd fallen down a grave somewhere in a drunken stupor and was confronting his own demons. It got colder, and the wind rattled the branches of the huge pine tree that shades my aunt's grave. If that tree ever needs to be pulled out, I forecast a problem with roots and rotting caskets. Finally, my father decided to get down to business, and we all huddled around the grave, and the two holes covered in ply wood with little wooden boxes perched on them. Words were spoken, and tears were shed, and I didn't see much of anything. I mean, it didn't matter, except for the fact that the lummox that was standing in front of me was my stoned uncle, being all ministerly and entirely too touchy feely sappy for my taste.

"Kumbaya your ass out of my way, and no, I don't want to talk about how I'm doing at school, if I'm working, while my grandparents are being lowered into the ground in their little wooden boxes."

I stood and held my mom's hand, which made me feel like a little kid, but in a good way, as a group decision was made about how to bury them. And it was just like that that I realized how unimportant the whole thing was right then, and that I understood how my father could be so non-chalant about doing this today. I mean, really....they're ashes. I mean, yeah, they were once people, but ashes....you're not halfway gone, you're not rotting, you're just not here period. Being cremated seems like this incredibly freeing thing to me now, because it's so --you don't even exist anymore, and you never will again. In horror flicks, people are always so reassured when vampires get hit by light and incinerate into ashes, and now I get it. There are no left-overs, you know? The formality of anything is completely eliminated if you get cremated, and I so totally dig that.

In anycase, it was with this sort of clumped chaotic bundle of thoughts that I thus started smiling as my little cousins started filling in the holes by hand. They were very industrious about the whole thing--burying their grandparents-- like it was some unfortunate pet that needed to be buried or something. I can't even imagine what was going through their heads though, as they busily pushed the dirt into the holes with their small hands, like it was the sole reason they'd shown up-- to do this for their grandparents. And it was so silly too, that I started to laugh, because the adults were just standing there watching them, giving them instruction and suggestions occasionally, like it was completely normal to have children bury the dead. But at the same time.... Our family is incredibly riotous on this side sometimes because they fight so much, but the one thing that unites us both is being able to laugh at a joke- a quality that both of my grandparents had. And if they'd been there to see this, they'd have been laughing the hardest I think, watching my tiny cousin Sean jumping up and down on their grave to pack the dirt down.

I'm sure this seems twisted and wrong by now, but it was actually quite a nice way to end things, on a light note. Afterwards, we put the flowers we'd all brought next to the head stone, and I wandered through the cemetary until I found some of the same pinecones that they'd had in their yard when we were little and added them to the bundle of bright colors already there.

When we were little, we were always climbing the pine trees in my grandparent's front yard, and it was the ritual, every time that we came over, as a result of the tree climbing, that we would have to go find Grandma and she would wipe the sap off our hands with kerosene. And she was the only one who ever did a good job of it, lol.

After this big debacle, we went over to my grandparents old house, which is now my Aunt Bird's house, for a coffee and some snacks. I hadn't been there since I moved out in April, so that was a little bit strange. It's strange because there are no pictures on the wall anymore in places where they were unmovingly for 50 years prior. I mean, the place still looks good now, but it's so strange. At the same time, it's interesting to see the house get so "used" now all of a sudden, because all of a sudden, there are kids in the house again, the Clan, of four kids, which is still not much compared to the five girls and one boy who lived there once a long time ago (my dad and his sisters). Aunt Bird and Co. just got two new cats too, which is cool. One is a bengal, and the other one is a grey shorthair tabby cat. They're both beautiful, but the bengal is absolutely fascinatingly gorgeous and interesting to me. If I were to ever buy a cat from a breeder (highly unlikely actually), that would be the one. But, maybe I'll happen upon it one day, in an adoption agency or something. The second cat, they just got today, is really cute, and has a really mild mannerment, though you can tell that already at 6 months that he's been getting spoiled a lot. He's got a lot of attitude, and he's got a lot of ribbons from yesterday's cat show to prove it. Like eight, or something ridiculous like that. As interesting as the Feline Friends thing was yesterday...I'm still not so cool with the idea of showing a cat. They always seem so mentally fragile to me, unlike dogs. Like, Cat Lady's second cat yesterday was not in good shape at all from being there. It's too stressful. Want to wreck a pet? Stick him in a cage in the middle of never ending loud noises, and have him be roughly handled by judges all day. Done.

Last on my secret blogging agenda: my parents came over this morning and put up pictures for me. The place looks quite a lot cosier now. Especially the kitchen.  ¶ 5:30 PM