vaxjedi | The Day After

The day after the funeral, we spent a lot of time going through my grandmother's effects.

There is something ghoulish about going through the belongings of the deceased. I mean, there is all this stuff and it have to go somewhere or be tossed out. But it seemed odd to be pawing through the stuff and deciding what you wanted, sort of a morbid swap meet.

As we are looking at things, my mother hands me a few folders with my name in them, written in my grandmother's handwriting. She'd kept folders of pictures of me and other things. There were my graduation announcements from highschool, as well as some poems and letters I'd written here and there. There were some things in there I barely remembered doing. For example, Grandma had asked me once to write up a definition of software and a definition of hard rock for her. She wanted to have them to talk to her friends at the retirement community she lived at. Apparently, she made photocopies and handed them out. But she had the extras in the folder she put together about me.

Another thing we found were genealogy papers. In fact, on one side of my grandmother's family, they had extensive records. My uncle Gene is going to scan all of them in and we're going to give them to Eleri's mother, who has a lot of experience researching genealogy.

It sounds kinda silly, but I sort have discovered that I have a family. I mean, I always knew my relatives were there, but I had no real connection to them besides the fact that they were relatives. I guess part of that is really that I felt like none of my relatives really ever listened or understood what I was saying. So I got very used to not being connected to them. And people with close knit families always vaguely confused me. Relatives weren't people you connected with, they were just people who were kinda there and you had to deal with them because you were related.

But now, we have things to talk about. Or at least, it seems like they want to talk with me rather than at me. (Maybe it's because I am an 'adult' now). Or maybe they were listening, but never really mentioned it before and didn't realize I didn't know.

I want to put up a website for my family and Eleri's family. Just bits of information. Maybe even a family tree and a set of family weblogs.