Within 72 hours cousins, aunts, uncles, friends, mothers, fathers, wives, husbands, kids, passerby, and maybe ne'er-do-well pepper me with questions like — when is the funeral? who is invited? when will the burial be? can they attend?
These people all mean well, and I love them. They want and need closure. They want to participate. They want to help. They want to show support. I love it! Truly. I just don’t understand it.
Who has these details figured out immediately? For my siblings, they’re still figuring out their day and what they’ll do next. They’re stressed. The LAST thing they want to think about are these details. Me, meh, I prefer to work on these things on a work day as this feels like work to me.
I realize these are natural questions. And I am sure some families have these things ironed out well in advance. But we did not intentionally. We didn’t know when Dad would pass. And, we didn’t know what we didn’t know — those are terrible conditions for making effective decisions. Instead, we chose to see how things looked post-death and mindfully and methodically work the problem — as a group (my siblings and I).
I laugh as I write this post to you. So many people tell me “everybody grieves in a unique way”, yet, it also appears that everyone expects everyone to have their shit together the same way too.