It's all about me after all

[muckefuck]

So if that last post about my grandma's funeral sounded like an attempt to rationalise an essentially selfish decision, then there's good reason for it. As I said to monshu the next day, "There's no question whether it's a selfish decision. The question is whether it's unreasonably selfish." At the risk of oversimpliflying almost to the point of caricature, I think it comes down to a basic conflict between my parents' inherited sense of duty and their stabs at 60s-era self-actualisation--a conflict lovingly bequeathed to me.

After all, from the traditional point of view, there's no conflict: Funerals are a responsibility that comes with being part of a family. The only excuse for not attending is being in some way indisposed--too sick to travel, serving overseas and unable to get leave, in jail, etc. But the countercultural response to this is a rejections of empty forms in favour of a focus on those experiences which enable one to live a more open, more honest, less stressful and contradictory sort of life. Under that ethos, attending a funeral has to be evaluated in terms of the benefit to those experiencing it. Insofar as you need one in order to provide closure and a space for grieving, it's a worthwhile thing; to the extant that it's a hypocritical exercise in social posturing, it's not only unnecessary but actively harmful to one's personal growth.

My grandmother had absolutely no use for hippy-dippy sentiments, so if I were acting in accordance with "the will of the deceased", I'd be in a suit and tie right now lugging her coffin to Calvary. (Of course, if her will meant much of anything to me, I would hardly be a man-loving apostate, would I?) But positivism has no real use for such fuzzy conceptions such as the "will" of a person who no longer exists and postmodernism deconstructs such phrasing into a tool of reactionary social oppression. (See, grandpa was right about not sending me to college at a "hotbed of socialism".) I believe as firmly as I do anything that my grandmother's spirit is not wavering in the aether to take in who showed and who didn't. The only people doing that are my relatives, and I learned after much difficulty that caring what my relatives think of me is a road to unhappiness.

The only person whose opinion really counts for me in the matter is my mother's and she--true to the conflict of being a mash-up between pre-boomer quasi-hippie and good daughter from a petit-bourgeois home--has been sending out her share of mixed messages: Disappointed with the decision while insisting that she wouldn't have presented one if it weren't okay to say 'no'. I don't think she's just being brave when she tells me that she doesn't need the shoulder to lean on and so far her disappointment has centred around formal gestures like not having a pallbearer from our branch of the family(*). That's just an approach guaranteed to rankle with me, for all sorts of reasons.

Well, in truth she's not the only person. I care a great deal what monshu thinks, even if I'll do my own thing regardless. And, of course, I want to find a solution that I myself can live without a lot of hand-wringing and second-guessing. For a while, I thought a good compromise might be showing up for Thanksgiving--something I took a principled stance against a decade ago and haven't revisited since--but I'm beginning to question the usefulness of that compromise. Of maybe I'm just too spoiled and solipsistic, to jealous of my own free time to commit to it. I'm sure my grandparents would think so.


* Part of me responds to the elegant symbolism of this gesture, and part of me rankles at the thought that certain branches of the family are automatically excluded because this or that sibling didn't have the forethought to produce offspring with penises. If what you want is a child of my mother with upper body strength, don't look at the bookish out-of-shape wuss and not the mother of four portable but extremely heavy children.

Comments

[f8n-begorra.livejournal.com]

A friend of mine recently noted that the Irish do three things well: Horses, Guinness and Death. Having experienced more than my share of departures for my age, I've found that with death comes clarity. The truest feelings and emotions are right there - visible, obvious and clear as daylight. I've gained my deepest insights and formed my most profound evaluations of what is important- in subjective or objective terms- or not, at the death of a loved one. I trust those emotions and the actions they present.

[pklexton.livejournal.com]

I didn't go to the funerals for either of the last two of my grandparents to pass away. In my grandmother's case, I had just a few days before made a cross country trip to see her in the hospital before she died. Fortunately she was still lucid and we had a very nice final visit. Somehow I thought it would be extravagant to fly across country again just a week later. In my grandfather's case, he was a bit of an old cuss and I was sort of sick at the time anyway. At times I regret not going, but only at times. If I had gone, I wouldn't have those occasional pangs of regret. The occasional regret has nothing to do with what my other relatives think; it's more just squaring in my own mind whether I sufficiently honored them.

[innerdoggie.livejournal.com]

Oh dear! You've been through a lot lately. I'm not sure I would've headed down for Funeral #2 so shortly after Funeral #1.

[mollpeartree.livejournal.com]

Agreed that that's a lot of funerals lately and I don't have an opinion at all about whether you should go to this one or not, BUT ...

Another purpose of going to a funeral is to make the people whe really are grieving feel better. I've gone to funerals of coworkers just because I remember being kind of put out that nobody from the place my dad worked for 25+ years bothered to show up at his (probably because he'd retired several years earlier and that workplace didn't exist anymore, per se. But still.) Two people from the part-time job he'd taken as a retiree did show up, and it meant a lot to me, to know that other people valued him too.

Also, particularly with elderly people, you might learn interesting stuff about them in the eulogy that you didn't know before. At one grandmother's funeral, I learned she'd gone to college and gotten an art degree in Washington DC, and driven a cab there for a while (the cab part may have been made up by my cousin Wayne, a jokester, but maybe not; it didn't occur to me to ask my dad about it before he died. There was no discussion of how she ended up going back to Iowa and being a farmer's wife anyway after all of that, either. My dad's family is on the taciturn side.)