Yeah, so.
I kept meaning to write up a really long, tl;dr entry about my life lately, but I don't think it's going to get done, so this will have to do.
My grandmother died 10 days ago. It was both expected and unexpected, if that makes any sense, but it was sufficiently unexpected that we ended up packing in a rush and driving 19 hours straight through to go to Minnesota when we got the word that things were bad. She died at 6:21 AM the next morning; I think we were in Iowa at the time. Ah, cell phones.
Minnesota was kind of surreal: not just the weirdness of the visitation (I'm still not sure I understand the idea of "Stare At The Corpse Hour," entirely, but it helped my mother shake off her denial) and the funeral (extremely Catholic despite my grandmother's relative skepticism), but the dynamics of my mother and her siblings figuring out how to be orphans together. Once we got through funeral planning, it still ended up culminating in this siblings-only powwow that left the rest of us exiled and speculating. (I hope I will be forgiven for thinking that I was basically watching the endgame of Unclean Legacy, except with no supernatural powers and more complaints about who is or is not "the boss of us.")
I ended up doing a lot of thinking during the trip. My mother's family is a huge and remarkably unified group; all of them but us and a few cousins are living in Minnesota, and I'm fairly sure Aunt Sue and Uncle Paul are the only ones other than us who have lived outside of Minnesota for any significant amount of time. As a result, we're kind of always at the periphery, especially Dad and I. What I came to realize this trip is that this was more or less a deliberate choice on my mom's part -- to move to Alaska, lo these many years ago, and be at a (safe?) distance from her family. It was the same choice my father made, and as a result I've always been pretty unmoored from my extended family and, ever since middle school, from any geographical notion of "home." My parents wanted me to be capable of adventure, but now, looking down the barrel of a fifth state of residence in just under 23 years, I realize that this is not the way most people's worlds work. Most people have a distinct sense of their "homeland." Many people stay in the same state, or the same city, their whole lives, usually the same state or city where their extended family is. Most people find the concept of packing up and moving a thousand miles away vastly less trivial than I do. What does this mean, besides my possibly having an easier time in the hunt for tenure? And what happens if that hunt for tenure lands me somewhere far away from those I care for, people who don't share that sense of flexibility about travel and relocation? What happens then?
I also, inevitably, thought a lot about religion. I'm starting to think that my stance on it is right out of X-Files: I want to believe. I'm not a sneering teenage atheist anymore; I recognize the power religion has to give comfort and meaning, and I respect that. In some ways, I wish I could find some faith that gave me comfort and meaning in the way it does other people. But... it just doesn't work. To give the first example that comes to mind: I believe that Christianity is a faith that provides a lot of people with support and hope in their lives, and in a lot of ways I envy that. I think I could live a life as a good Christian, albeit maybe with a little less bearing witness than most. But the problem is that I do not, and am starting to think I cannot, believe that Jesus was the resurrected Son of God. I'm not sure I can believe at all in an omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent God at all; I can't get past the problem of evil, or even the problem of Hell. It's just not something I can have faith in. I'm starting to wonder if I'm even capable of faith in the true, religious sense of the word, not in the "faith the sun comes up in the morning and emeralds are not really grue" meaning, of "faith that prior evidence is consistent with the future / the laws of nature will stay consistent." I just don't know. It's proving a challenging question to consider, particularly in the light of desperately wanting to believe that Grandma is in Heaven but not quite being able to actually have faith in that.
Things are quieting down here. We've been home since Thursday, and not much has happened: reading, roleplaying, nature-watching, and time with the cats. Louisiana is as we left it, full of hummingbirds and anoles. This is summer, and life will go on. I think. I hope.
My grandmother died 10 days ago. It was both expected and unexpected, if that makes any sense, but it was sufficiently unexpected that we ended up packing in a rush and driving 19 hours straight through to go to Minnesota when we got the word that things were bad. She died at 6:21 AM the next morning; I think we were in Iowa at the time. Ah, cell phones.
Minnesota was kind of surreal: not just the weirdness of the visitation (I'm still not sure I understand the idea of "Stare At The Corpse Hour," entirely, but it helped my mother shake off her denial) and the funeral (extremely Catholic despite my grandmother's relative skepticism), but the dynamics of my mother and her siblings figuring out how to be orphans together. Once we got through funeral planning, it still ended up culminating in this siblings-only powwow that left the rest of us exiled and speculating. (I hope I will be forgiven for thinking that I was basically watching the endgame of Unclean Legacy, except with no supernatural powers and more complaints about who is or is not "the boss of us.")
I ended up doing a lot of thinking during the trip. My mother's family is a huge and remarkably unified group; all of them but us and a few cousins are living in Minnesota, and I'm fairly sure Aunt Sue and Uncle Paul are the only ones other than us who have lived outside of Minnesota for any significant amount of time. As a result, we're kind of always at the periphery, especially Dad and I. What I came to realize this trip is that this was more or less a deliberate choice on my mom's part -- to move to Alaska, lo these many years ago, and be at a (safe?) distance from her family. It was the same choice my father made, and as a result I've always been pretty unmoored from my extended family and, ever since middle school, from any geographical notion of "home." My parents wanted me to be capable of adventure, but now, looking down the barrel of a fifth state of residence in just under 23 years, I realize that this is not the way most people's worlds work. Most people have a distinct sense of their "homeland." Many people stay in the same state, or the same city, their whole lives, usually the same state or city where their extended family is. Most people find the concept of packing up and moving a thousand miles away vastly less trivial than I do. What does this mean, besides my possibly having an easier time in the hunt for tenure? And what happens if that hunt for tenure lands me somewhere far away from those I care for, people who don't share that sense of flexibility about travel and relocation? What happens then?
I also, inevitably, thought a lot about religion. I'm starting to think that my stance on it is right out of X-Files: I want to believe. I'm not a sneering teenage atheist anymore; I recognize the power religion has to give comfort and meaning, and I respect that. In some ways, I wish I could find some faith that gave me comfort and meaning in the way it does other people. But... it just doesn't work. To give the first example that comes to mind: I believe that Christianity is a faith that provides a lot of people with support and hope in their lives, and in a lot of ways I envy that. I think I could live a life as a good Christian, albeit maybe with a little less bearing witness than most. But the problem is that I do not, and am starting to think I cannot, believe that Jesus was the resurrected Son of God. I'm not sure I can believe at all in an omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent God at all; I can't get past the problem of evil, or even the problem of Hell. It's just not something I can have faith in. I'm starting to wonder if I'm even capable of faith in the true, religious sense of the word, not in the "faith the sun comes up in the morning and emeralds are not really grue" meaning, of "faith that prior evidence is consistent with the future / the laws of nature will stay consistent." I just don't know. It's proving a challenging question to consider, particularly in the light of desperately wanting to believe that Grandma is in Heaven but not quite being able to actually have faith in that.
Things are quieting down here. We've been home since Thursday, and not much has happened: reading, roleplaying, nature-watching, and time with the cats. Louisiana is as we left it, full of hummingbirds and anoles. This is summer, and life will go on. I think. I hope.