Forewarning: this is hard for me. Really hard. Bear with me if I ramble.
So this summer, my grandfather was diagnosed with lung cancer. He started chemo (after a lot of uncertainty about the possibility and value of going through chemo) right after I left for France. My grandparents have always been very present in my life. Ever since I was about six they lived around the corner from me and we had steak dinners with them regularly, and they would babysit me when my mom had meetings, and we celebrated all holidays together. And I have always seen my grandfather as this wonderfully worldly and strong person who has been all over the world and seen so many things. Even this summer when he was pretty weak, he was stubbornly independent (source of much frustration for my mother) and very strong in his own way. So it was really hard for me to even imagine him in a hospital bed in Manzano del Sol's care center, much less as weak as my mom has described to me in many long late night emails (which, despite being really upsetting at times, have been indispensable for me over the last few months).
Death is not something I've ever really had to confront, but it's also not something I am terribly afraid of. I believe in a general interconnectedness in the universe. I know that death is a part of living, and I think that in whatever way, people who die always stay with us. But you can say that all you want until you have to confront losing someone who has always been in your life and who means so much to you. So when emails from my mom started to talk about the inevitability of my grandpa's death, I kind of started freaking out. I wasn't ready...and I REALLY wasn't ready to deal with it alone. I'm not actually alone in any of this because I have amazing family and friends, but it's easy to feel like I am when they are all a third of the way around the world from me.
So that's what I've been trying to deal with while traveling around Europe and going to school and living in France and dealing with student strikes and rail strikes. That's why I often get the urge to stay in bed under the covers all day long and that's why I sometimes have to fight the urge to burst into tears in class or on the metro. And that's why when my phone rang at 8:30 this morning (just two hours after I crawled into bed), and i saw my home phone number part of me wanted to huddle down in bed more and not answer the phone, but I did answer the phone and I tried to pretend that my mom's voice was coming from next to me in bed instead of through a phone from thousands of miles away.
And I spent the day celebrating my grandfather's life doing something he would have loved. I took a bus with most of the other Oregon students and some invitees (including Wei-Ching) and went to a small vineyard in the Beaujolais region run by this really sweet couple and we learned about wine tasting and ate an amazing meal, and then they showed us how they make break in this big brick oven. It was a really fantastic experience.
Despite the fact that I was celebrating grandpa's life in my own little way, I felt so strange hanging out with everyone and talking excitedly about the MC Solaar concert and getting to after-party with him and his crew--which I'm still really excited about. As a sidenote, I kind of wonder at the fact that I was sitting in a VIP lounge in the Radisson drinking a cocktail and bise-ing MC Solaar while my grandpa was "flying away". I know it's easy to read into things like this and look for universal connections, but it's kind of nice to think that maybe my grandpa was there in spirit nudging the situation along so that i could have that once in a lifetime experience. Anyway, back to my train of thought...it was a very strange feeling day, because very few people that I was with had any idea of what I was (and have been) going through. I'm not very good at making myself the center of what feels like pitiful attention...and I don't generally like to put my problems on other people unless I know that they are a part of that group of wonderful close people that I don't know what I would do without. I don't know how to say, hey by the way guys, my grandpa is in the hospital and that's really hard on me, or hey by the way guys my grandpa passed away yesterday. I mean...where does that fit into discussions about the strikes and wine and MC Solaar and whatever else it is that people my age who are studying in France talk about? I haven't figured that out yet.
And so I have long email correspondences with my mom, and talk to her on the phone, and sometimes I talk about it to my friends back home on AIM, and I call my best friend, and I listen to the playlist I made called "Dealing", and I cry sometimes in my room, and I look forward to going home in February, and otherwise I try to experience Lyon and Europe and the universe to their fullest(s?) because everyone reminds me that that is what my grandpa expected and wanted me to do and that's what I'm here for and that's probably the best (if not the only) way to get through this given the circumstances.
And now I am going to go to sleep because I am emotionally wiped out and my body does not appreciate the fact that I got less than 3 hours of sleep last night.
I feel like I should have some really deep ending to this...but I don't. So there you go.
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