Chrisonomicon

Friday, May 30, 2003

The cumulonimbi accompanying us on our nightly drive to the gym released at first small droplets that scattered across the windshield, followed by larger, more intensely hurled globules of water, flung as though in demand of our attention, and I thought they looked like huge tears, remembering how hard my mom had cried ? no, wailed ? when my grandmother passed away almost ten years ago.

And then this morning her mother passed away.

She seemed to take it rather well, but I could sense the tension underneath her skin, rippling invisibly, her voice vaguely vibrato when she spoke. I attributed her composure to the fact that we?d been anticipating it for weeks now, after my grandmother had suffered bouts of about every possible ailment. Her passing was something everyone was relieved to have happened. Also, my mom had been so far removed from the situation, states away, whereas here she?d taken intimate care of my other grandmother for almost four years prior to the end. Her composure won?t last much longer, though. She?s waiting. The breakdown will be at the funeral. I just wish I could be there to hold her when it happens.

And this feeling of removal is perpetuated as our family drifts further apart with my move out of the city and Derek flying to London. After taking my mom to the airport, I took advantage of being in the south of the city to tighten up some of those loosened connections and visit Lindsay who?s back from Germany for a few weeks.

Families are liquid, the connections fluid, as elders pass away and children move away, connections stretched and dissipated and new families formed from the remnants. I?ve never understood the religious push for stable, nuclear families when the nature of such unions is so transient. And that only leads me to the notion ? however hippy (or is it "hippie"?) ? that there ought to be some sort of focus on the global family, an emphasis on the fundamental connections that we all share, and that we should cast off this inbred, apathetic ignorance of such understanding between one another to realize that we all want the same sort of things in life.

That ties us together tighter than genetics.