SHUT the Front Door

Family is odd, eclectic, wonderful and usually loud and occasionally unbearable. Mine is no exception. Luckily, boyfriend loves me very, very much. Enough to happily handle kooky aunts, brazen uncles, and a thousand and one cousins, second cousins, children and parents.

I speak of family because my grandmother passed on October 11, 2011. She passed as any of us should hope to go: coffee in hand, snuggled in her favorite chair, her list for the day half-written in her lap. She was looking forward to seeing me in four days, and seeing everyone in the family in a little more than a month for my mom's birthday party.

My Nana is the reason good cookery floats in my genetics, she's the reason I enjoy turning my hand at arts and crafts, and how I know that my love for a good book and my constant reading is genetically related and not just me. Last year, when she was in and out of the hospital for months, Mom and I got sent to the library to get her a new stack of books. The way we knew we weren't picking ones she'd already read is because we'd check the spine on the inside cover...in the ones she'd read, she'd written a "P" lightly in pencil. We couldn't stop her from cooking random things like wonton soup, and her "fruit compost compote" that she brought camping was both loved and hated.

It's been a month, and still I have that niggling feeling in the back of my head that is my usual reminder that it's time to write to her again. Even though she won't receive it, I keep opening my drawer of smokey stationary that she send every time it'd been too long since I'd written and reaching for a card -- only to remember.

No more tears though.

We saw her off exactly the way she would have wanted. I don't know if you have ever heard of a Balinese Funeral Procession, but it's quite something. The Hindus of Bali carry their dead on a litter in a parade-like procession, circling the litter to confuse the spirit to keep it from returning home and using drums and flutes to further disturb it and chase it into the afterworld. At the end of the procession in Bali the dead are burned on a pyre, and celebration of life ensues.

This is how my grandmother asked to be sent forth. My uncles carried her ashes on a litter, and there was no burning at the end, but one of my nana's little old lady friends chuckled to me as we tromped down the street my mother grew up on banging pots and pans, "Your grandmother is watching us and laughing her head off right now because she made us look like fools."

I heartily agreed. Nana would have been laughing so hard to see us marching up and down the street. She also would have been in the center of it all (well, technically she was anyways) banging pots and hollering.

Nana was dramatic that way.

After the funeral procession, there were speeches, tears, and lots of champagne. "When in Rome, do as the Romans do...when in Pat's house, do as Pat would have done," one of my uncles said to me as we raised our glasses in a toast.

As the members of her Lunch Bunch, Symphony League, Danville Democrats, Book Club, and others slowly trickled out the door, family degenerated and became more family. We convened, glasses and treats in hand in Nana's favorite room, looking at old pictures and movies my uncle had brought and talking about her, family stuff and life in general.

Kids chased each other around the coffee table and wreaked a bit of havoc while we laughed and cooed over my cousin's 9-month-old. Predictably, a child tripped, a hand went out, and a glass bit the dust.

"Shhhhhi-UT the front door!" My cousin cried out.

The room went silent, and then as one, we all roared with laughter. My cousin and her husband explained that they were trying to curb their language now that their little one was old enough to understand it...and repeat it.

As is unspoken tradition in the family -- or maybe just an inability to let go of a joke -- "SHUT the front door" was repeated over and over throughout the rest of the night. It could have been worse...last time we were together, the phrase that pays was "We don't talk about that."

Ah, family. It's only truly funny if you were there.

My nana was there that night, laughing with us.

Ciao,
kc