Thursday, Dec. 25, 2003

merry christmas

My grandmother died last night. Well, she is not truly my grandmother -- she was my father's step-mother. But my real grandmother died when I was just a baby, so she was the only grandmother i ever really knew on that side.

Not to say I really knew her. I scarcely know anyone on that side of the family. And she was really very sick, it's almost a blessing. My father wasn't very close to her either -- she married his father after he had left for college. But its still very sad -- my grandfather has no idea what to do. a relic of the 1950s he doesn't know how to use a microwave or send christmas cards or anything remotely domestic. I went with my parents today to visit him . . . if only for the ride there. i love the way the eastern shore of maryland looks, especially in the winter. so mysterious and eerily beautiful. vast open spaces. river after river, azure water lined with golden grasses and tall, naked trees bent by the wind. Large, empty yellow fields with silos and barns. frozen in time. so different from where i grew up. nearly the same as when my dad lived there.

I think I would be able to understand the inevitability of death. I think I would have a hard time understanding the inevitibility of reaching the end of your life. Being old, and losing abilities and acquiring health problems . . . having to come to the understanding that in the grand scheme of things, you will be dead soon. And having to understand how I got there. Time, I do not and will not ever understand time, how and why it passes, how my father was once a little boy and my grandfather was a young man who raised him and he too was once a little boy and before that he was a baby and before that he was in someone's womb and before that he was nothing but now he is old and at the end of his life and how someday, god willing, i will be old too, but before i was young and i still am young but i feel so old but i feel so young.

While in caroline county i saw the grave of my dad's little brother who drowned in the river when he was two. he'll never get older. And i think what a tragedy that was, when something as sad as that happens, especially in such a small town. People there today still remember it. But i think of the people alive today who otherwise would not have been born, and the future people who would not have been born, if little johnny had not died. I don't know what that means. you couldn't ask someone today to kill their child so someone, some unknown person in the future could live . . .

there is so much in life i will never understand. i don't think anyone understands it, even if they think they do.