Death brings closure, to be sure, and it brings people out of the woodwork, too. For me, it’s that fine line – the delicate balance – between madness and insanity. I’ve oft joked that I’m the most normal one in my immediate family. I’ve been scoffed at for that comment. However, upon face-to-face greetings?
“Wow, Kramer, you were right,” and that’s just scary.
Yeah, I’m also the most focused. That, too, is a frightening concept. The title’s mania is all about the behaviors, good, bad, ugly, that occur around death. One minute, it’s euphoria, the next is anger, the next is that stomach-wrenching sadness where a part of the heart feels like it just can’t go on any more.
There are a couple of questions that must be answered. Just, exactly, which god did I piss off to deserve four weekends in a row – in Dallas, in the summer?
My sister, “I’m sorry, I’m weepy, I’m menopausal, you know,” and frankly? I thought it was normal grief.
Phones:
Phone duty was kind of amusing. When I answered? The universal question, “Is there anything I can do?”
“No food. No, really, two iceboxes are stuffed already, more arrives every day, and without my father here, there’s no one to eat clean-up.”
No flowers, no plants, none of that crap. Please, think about the living, me, my sister, my mother will be just fine. However, in lieu flowers or other crap that’s dead and gone or thrown away in a few minutes, hours, or maybe, at the most a week?
Two charities were near and dear to my father’s heart, Shakespeare Festival of Dallas and UT’s McDonald Observatory. A donation, like the price of flowers? In his name, to either organization – Otto K. Wetzel.
