a goodbye

My great aunt Stella died about a month ago. She'd been sick for a long time and everyone knew she would pass soon. And then she did. Her grandson Daniel, who she adored, was by her side.
The funeral was sad- a goodbye to someone we loved in complicated ways. A good woman, who was often afraid, strong and sometimes unforgiving, with a stubborness. I hope she was happy in her life, in her choices and, ultimately, in her death.
I've been thinking a lot about death over the past couple of months. It's always fascinated me as a topic- I'm always curious to here other's experiences with their loved ones dying. I watched the series finale of Six Feet Under - without giving anything away, we go into the future and see how all these people that we've grown to love (& hate) in real and complicated ways die. Someone told me, while I was mourning Auntie Stella, that with a death a whole world dies. With Auntie's death, i lost my last link to my grandparents' generation.
there is a speech near the end of Angels in America, where Harper sees the souls of the dead moving up into the heavens (a sort of rapture, if you will) and speaks of the painful process of life. I've had conversations about life with many people & one common theme is the grasping for meaning in our lives and in the lessons we learn from each other. this conversation always leads to a discussion of loss and why we suffer. this painful process of the loves, the sorrows, the joys, births and deaths are all a part of our life and our evolution. they may not mean anything but they point to the future and may lead to solace. at least i hope so.

Night flight to San Francisco - chase the moon across America.
I dreamed we were there. The plane leapt the tropopause, the safe air, and attained the outer rim, the ozone, which was ragged and torn, patches of it threadbare as old cheesecloth, and that was frightening. But I saw something that only I could see, because of my astonishing ability to see such things: Souls were rising, from the earth far below, souls of the dead, of people who had perished, from famine, from war, from the plague, and they floated up, like skydivers in reverse, limbs all akimbo, wheeling and spinning. And the souls of these departed joined hands, clasped ankles, and formed a web, a great net of souls, and the souls were three-atom oxygen molecules, of the stuff of ozone, and the outer rim absorbed them, and was repaired. Nothing's lost forever. In this world, there's a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we've left behind, and dreaming ahead. At least I think that's so. (Tony Kushner, Angels in America)

So- goodbye to my Auntie Stella and all the world that was hers.