| Life after death. |
[Tuesday, Feb. 10th, 2009|04:00 pm]
The richest girl in town.
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After having not slept or eaten or cried since she received the phone call at 6 a.m. on Friday morning, my mother finally had a meltdown at the White Horse on Sunday night. I was in the city having dinner when she called. I eventually made it back to the East Bay and drove over to her place in Berkeley. She was a mess, understandably, and we stayed up drinking tea and talking for a while before I dosed her with a Klonopin. She slept until 5 in the morning, which isn't great, but better.
I slept in the living room on the hospital bed we'd rented for my grandmother. Java, never one to miss an opportunity to sleep with me, didn't try to get on the bed even once but slept beside it.
Yesterday, we went to deal with my grandmother's bank accounts (which my name is on) and then headed to the mortuary to make final arrangements, and that's when I lost it. My mother wanted to see the body, and though I wasn't sure I did, I went in with her. It was strange seeing Nana that way, wrapped in a white sheet. Part of me expected her to sit up and complain about not having her own clothes on, but actually, she looked really peaceful. And about 20 years younger. My mother noted that she looked very Indian, a genetic gift from my great grandmother Nancy Ann Farris, who was born in Missouri in the late 1800s.
We're having her cremated, as shipping her body back to Illinois is not only ridiculously expensive, but just unnecessary. Neither my mother nor I have ever liked the morbidity of open-casket funerals, even though that's how my family usually does it. And since my grandmother's last church in Chicago doesn't have space for a proper funeral anyway, and we had no intention of burying her in Springfield, where she lived with her sister for eight years before I moved her here, it just didn't make sense. We will go back to Chicago at some point to scatter her ashes there, but in the meantime, we're having a memorial for her here on Saturday:
East Bay Church of Religious Science
Fireside Room
4130 Telegraph Avenue, Oakland, CA
2:00 p.m.
Thank you again to everyone who's called and written and texted me. I really appreciate it, though I've been rather overwhelmed and unable to reply to each of you. And also, thank you to the folks who've been bringing me food and booze, and to  whittles for organizing that. (Whom do I thank for the bottle of Veuve Clicquot? I'm afraid I was so thoroughly three sheets to the wind on Friday, that I don't remember the lovely person who shoved that box into my hands.) Thanks also to conditionbronze, for everything.
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On a totally different topic, I thought there were no photos from my actual performance as a zombie Holly Golightly from Breakfast at Tiffany's at Zombie Prom. (I used the eerie, otherworldly "Moon River" as beat-juggled--three copies of the same song--by turntablist Kid Koala.) But it turns out there were photographers there from the SF Weekly:
The whole slideshow is here. |
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