So a few minutes ago I learned that the phone call in the small hours of the morning that I ignored as probably a wrong number and anyway, I’m asleep, goddamnit, was actually my father calling to tell me that my grandmother had died.

That’ll teach me to answer the phone…

She was ninety-five. We were not close, and as I will try not to speak ill of the dead, perhaps all I can say is that she was a product of her time and upbringing, as I suppose we all are, for better or worse. I don’t quite know how to feel about it–excessive grief would be misplaced, for a woman I have not seen in nearly two decades, and had a less than stellar relationship with when alive, but I am too far removed and too long out of the complex webs of family obligation to feel the guilty relief that tends to crop up in similiar circumstances, either. The emotional baggage has long since passed its expiration date and quietly turned to dust in the back attics of the soul. And hell, when somebody is ninety-five, there’s a practical limit on the amount of shock one feels about their demise–we all should live so long.

I suppose what I feel is sort of “Huh,” writ large. It is a thing, that has happened. How peculiar that it should happen.

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