Circle of life (to the tune of the Lion King)

Hi folks,

You will pardon my sad post and lack of posts in the last few weeks but I had the unfortunate news that my grandfather passed away on Monday morning and with that came all the craziness and grief that surrounds a funeral.

It has not been fun to deal with watching him die for the past few weeks and in fact has been one of the most eye opening and deep things I have had to experience in a long time.

In times like these you are just forced to reflect on what is important to you and what is meaningful because I can tell you this much, if something in your life is bullshit, it is super hard to care about it when you have so much else happening. Does that make sense? Just puts things into perspective, I guess.

It makes the cop who pulled me and my husband over last week and was super annoying less worthy to rant about and our subsequent ticket less worrisome- makes the crackhead on the bus with me that I was certain was going to follow me home and bite off my face more tolerable. And this is not to say I will not be back with a vengeance ranting about all these seemingly less important things- just for right now, right here it is good for me to get out of my head in that way and look at what is real.

I can say this with confidence: I have wonderful caring friends and family. Forget that I have not had a kitchen to eat in for WEEKS and I have had such kind and generous visitors and people who offered their help and home cooked meals- that alone really showed me how loved we are- I am especially grateful to the support I have felt while dealing with the past 2 weeks specifically. I know that everyone has their own shit to deal with but I will never forget how kind and thoughtful my friends have been in being in touch consistently to just ask “how are you”.

At the funeral, we got a pretty large turnout of people coming to pay their respects to a man who has had 98 years of connecting with and impacting people in his journey. I watched the room fill up full of his peers and family, of my parents friends, all of whom had a story or 2 to share about my grandfather. Even my own friends and family and my husbands friends and family showed up. My parents and grandparents have set the bar high at how to be a friend and how to keep a friend and I was in awe to see a room of people who made my family their priority on a rainy Tuesday afternoon and have made the extra effort to be friends for this whole sad time.

You know I am not one for too much serious ness but when I looked around my parents home after the ceremony and was surrounded by my oldest friends, new friends, and others. I felt like maybe death is a good way of reminding those who the deceased leaves behind that there is also life, and it can be really beautiful.