Long Distance

I just found out that one of my uncles died today. He was my father's sister's husband, and he and my aunt had been married for fifty-four years.

I was extremely fond of him, and I love my aunt very much, so the news was of course shocking. Having said that, he was old and in poor health, and as such his death isn't a tragedy, just a "loss."

The reason that I'm so distressed by his death, really, is that I can't participate in its aftermath. One of the many things I hate about living so far away from my extended family is the inability to participate in so many of the family epochs-- births, deaths, and weddings that I only grasp fragments of through photos and stories. Deaths are the worst, because there are no pictures, no happy couple or child to actually ever see; just an abrupt hole in the tapestry.

I felt this most poignantly when one of my beloved grandfathers died. Despite having always lived on separate sides of the world we were extremely close, and his unexpected death ripped me apart. The worst was not being able to participate in anything: not the twelve days of mourning rituals, not the communal family grief. It was my first year in graduate school and while my relatives in India went through the elaborate process of sending my grandfather's soul on its way and gave away cows (really), I sat in my apartment weeping, and feeling terribly impotent and alone.

No one really likes funerary rituals, and with good reason. I imagine it's very strange
to conduct elaborate whatevers around a corpse (or the suggestion of one). But I remember when I visited India after my grandfather's death, I kept waiting for him to come into certain rooms, or find him sitting in his favorite chair. I never really got to say goodbye, so his perpetual absence was inexplicable and painful. Even worse, my raw grief was very unnerving to my relatives, especially my poor grandmother. They had all gone through the mourning process months before, but I had stalled somewhere in the middle.

Now my uncle is died, and once again I'm left feeling like while life itself is acknowledged and happening elsewhere, I am unable to do anything other than sift through memories and wait.