[Lie and wait in altered states inside]

The funeral and visitation went smoothly. Even in the face of profound loss, my family manages to be loud and boisterous, laughing and cutting up when possible. I’m sure people must’ve thought we were being insensitive, but we’ve never really been the kind of family to care what people think, so it doesn’t matter. We cope how we cope.

I wasn’t sure if I would get all emotional or not. Somehow, I’ve managed to repress my emotion at the past three funerals I’ve been to. I sat stone-faced through my grandmother’s and grandfather’s funerals two years ago, never crying a single tear. Ditto for my uncle’s funeral this summer. It wasn’t that I wasn’t hurting; I just didn’t want to be on display for everyone while I worked through my grief. But something snapped in me last night as Phil and I drove from Memphis straight to the church where everyone was waiting. I walked in the front door and there she was, lying motionless in the white, gilded casket with floral trimming she picked out a decade ago. She barely looked like herself. Her face was swollen, her hair wasn’t fixed the way she would’ve demanded, and her hands were purple. She was wearing a pink frilly nightgown that she picked out around the same time she went casket shopping. I didn’t linger over her too long; looking at the dead in such a way seems perverse to me. And rude. I don’t know.

But I walked back into the kitchen of the church, saw my dad, and lost it. I cried for Granny, and then I cried for Nana and Grandaddy too. I just started thinking about how so much in my life has changed and how I can’t be near my family as much as I should be. It’s like I’ve been forced to choose between a stagnant life of little opportunity near my family, or a life of opportunity and career fulfillment away from my family. Obviously, I chose to get out of Saltillo and Savannah and try to make a life for myself elsewhere. But that just means that I’m removed from the people I love. Stupid adulthood and all its quandaries.

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My nephews confided in me that they both have girlfriends, but I think they actually meant that they have crushes on some girls, since the girls in question don’t know that they like them. Casey said he liked a girl named Sheridan because she’s smart, makes straight A’s, is funny, and is cute. And Patrick said he likes this girl named Brooke because she’s “hot.” He said, “Every time we laugh, we look at each other.” On Valentine’s Day, Patrick plans to give her a love letter that he dictated to Casey.

Patrick also had a non-sequiter during the visitation. We were just sitting there and he said, “I feel sorry for hobbits, because they don’t have any shoes.” Ah, the mouths of babes.

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Phil has to go to M’boro tomorrow to work a couple of hours at the Shell station in order to get his vacation paycheck. What a crock. I hope he figures some way out of it. I don’t want to be alone in this town tomorrow night. Speaking of not being alone, Kristin and Jimmy and Alvy came and visited this weekend. We ate Chinese food and checked out the pretentious record stores. Watched Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, which I thought was pretty terrible. Good times.