An Interlude

After spending a week in San Diego I left my duffel bag in Cindy's capable hands and caught a flight across country. In the middle of my big adventure I needed to go to Florida to see my family and to pay my respects. You see, my Grandmother had died a few months before, and her funeral was finally being held.

Grandmama was the only grandparent I knew. My maternal Grandparents both passed before I was born, as did my paternal Grandfather. But Grandmama was unstoppable. She traveled, she socialized, she drove for days on end well into her 80's. At the age of 88 she went up a mountian in Bhutan on horseback. And at her surprise 90th birthday party, her friends sidled up to me to ask "is this a special birthday? Maybe her 80th?"

But her decline had been swift, and mercifully short. It lasted for less than a year, and I was only graced with one final visit, with my brother Ted. It was difficult to see her in illness, but my memories are still of a vivacious woman doing what she wants when she wants to.

My parents, my siblings, and my aunt and uncle spent that weekend seeing to Grandmama's final goodbyes. She had insisted that her funeral would not be a time of mourning, but of celebration, though in a restrained and decidedly Anglican fashion. And so while there was no dancing a la New Orleans, there was also no rending of clothes or wiping of ashes into our eyes. We wore no black and we talked about her life.

The next morning I returned to San Diego to resume my trip to South Lake Tahoe. The funeral was a brief, emotional, and very important interlude in my trip.