one more sad

Last week was a weird one, I must say. I worked Monday and Tuesday and had the rest of the week off. My company does a lot of things wrong but they do bereavement leave right. Not sure what to make of that.

I went to volunteering on Tuesday night, something I was more than a little worried about, as it is a group for grieving children. I worried about bursting into tears as soon as I walked in, but it was actually the perfect place for me to be. Which in hindsight is a big, fat DUH but my foresight is absolute shit.

I saw my family almost every day last week, which was good, but also cried a lot, which was not so fun, actually. I held it together for most of the viewing, even though I had to go hide in the kitchen (under pretense of water-getting) a few times, and I held it together not at all on Friday at the funeral. I did manage to read this:

The thing about having a grandma is that you think she’ll always be there, because she’s always been there. From the moment you’re born, she’s with you, cheering you on and letting you stay up too late and pretending not to notice when you swipe a peppermint from the candy jar when your parents aren’t looking. She’s just as proud of you for graduating as she is that you didn’t fall down while walking across the stage. So when your grandma dies, you feel it instantly. That person who used to let you win at board games and who totally believed you when you said you were going to grow up to be Mary Poppins is gone.

The hardest thing about losing someone you love is the realization that you’ll never see them again. That all of the memories you have of that person are it, there will never be more. You realize how very little time we actually get and you wish, desperately, for more.

We must remember that the memories we have of Grandma are ours forever. We might feel like we’re losing them or that we don’t have enough of them, but the memories we have of her are like puzzle pieces and each person in this family holds different pieces of the puzzle. Late night card games and camping trips, watching Disney movies over and over and sleepovers on New Years Eve, walking up to Lincoln Park and feeding ducks at the pond, chocolate martinis and Happy Birthday Jesus cakes. We all hold these memories and when we tell stories about Grandma, we’re putting the puzzle pieces together. We’re a family of storytellers, a family that can’t get together without telling stories of times past, and as long as we can share our memories of Grandma, she’ll always be with us.

But only because the eulogies were first and especially only because I ran up to the mic before anyone else got a chance to make me cry. After I sat back down, though, all bets were off. TEARS. EVERYWHERE. But I suppose that's what funerals are for, really, so...whatever.

I feel very whatever lately. Very blah. Very other words for depressed. Things are getting back to normal, I suppose. We watched Chuck last night and walked Max and laughed about stupid things and I read my book and went to sleep and had crazy, crazy dreams.

Which I expected, as I have been having some wicked crazy dreams lately. I've dreamt of zombies at least four out of the past seven nights. The other night, I dreamt that I was in that movie Skyline. Have you seen the preview? It looks pretty run of the mill alien-movie until the last shot, which is of lots and lots of screaming people being pulled into spaceships by a beam of light. Freaked my shit out, that did. Anyway, some other people and I were running from this light, obviously, and we took shelter in a house. Someone realized that the light couldn't pull up people with dyed hair (what?) so we all dyed our hair. Mine was dark, dark black, like Evil!Willow black. We went outside to test it but mine didn't work, the light still came and I started getting pulled away and that's when Robert Downey, Jr. flew over in his Iron Man suit (minus the helmet) and saved me, which was pretty awesome because Robert Downey, Jr. is totally on my list, only I woke up before I could dream-cheat on Joe. Oh well, maybe next time.

(I love you, Joe!)

Anyway. I don't know what all the zombie/alien dreams say about my psyche right now and I don't want to know, thank you very much, I just wish they'd stop.

I am, however, totally OK with the Robert Downey, Jr. dreams. HINT HINT, UNIVERSE.