Funeral

This last weekend I went to my grandmother’s to attend my great grandmothers’ funeral. She passed away at the age of 94. This meant that I had to see my extended family which I always feel is a little awkward. Most people usually think that they are completely different from their parents, I don’t. I am totally like my mom and dad, but it’s hard for me to imagine my parents being related to the rest of these people. Don’t get me wrong I love my family, that is not the case, I just don’t know how to relate to them and still be genuine. I’ve always been told that I am supposed to be polite and not swear around them but this goes against my base nature. So I assume this identity that is similar to me, but not quite and move amongst them undetected.

So, with my disguise firmly grasped, I traveled to the far reaches of East Texas to observe and live amongst the reclusive Servo clan, to observe their customs and watch as they put their matriarch to rest. I can honestly say with no self deception that I loved my great grandmother. She was a sweet woman and although I didn’t see her that often later in my life, my memories of her as a child are strong and filled with the warmth. She was the first person I ever knew that had a police scanner and I can still remember sitting with her in her old beat up recliner and listening to it drone out the days events all over town and thinking to myself that it was completely foolish for anyone to watch the news when you could just have one of these in your living room. Sitting there in her lap, sleepily looking out her giant picture window at the world that, while smaller, seemed all together new and different than my own. I will never be able to know what that world must have been like for her, but I know that her being there for me made it seem safer than it probably was.

I think that the true tragedy of her death is the affect that it will have on her son, my great uncle, Billy Dan. When Billy was a boy he suffered a fever and it left him mostly deaf and mentally handicapped and he has spent the past seventy something years living with his mother. Billy Dan has been an ever present fixture in my childhood. As a boy I adored him because he was the nicest person I knew and he had the biggest pocket knife collection I had ever seen in my entire life (but you couldn’t play with any of them because knives are not for children). And as I got older I always felt a certain affinity for Billy because he was the only person that felt more awkward than I did. So I would spend a lot of time with him sitting off in some corner, neither of us talking, because we both knew that we didn’t have anything to say to one another, and being completely ok with that. It absolutely breaks my heart to have to watch that sweet man try to cope with his own mother’s death. The one person in this world who has meant everything to him is gone and I don’t know how well he will be able to deal with that, and that worries me.

All is not so bleak, Billy Dan lives at a local nursing home and he has many friends there (people who are as nakedly genuine as him usually do). And he has my grandmother and my great aunt to help him cope. So I think he will be ok. But I still cant help but feel his heartache.

So I escaped relatively unscathed from my family. They all mean well, and the awkwardness I feel around them is no fault of theirs, so I guess they are all pretty decent people, salt of the earth and all that. And I saw Mur put to rest. It was probably for the best (god I hate that expression and its appropriateness). She lived long enough to ride this planet around the sun ninety four times, and that’s nothing to wipe your nose at. So god bless her for having the courage to live that long.

tommyservo