(no subject)

[kuangning]

Lots I should be saying, but...

• My aunt's funeral is slated for tomorrow. My mother left today (and you cannot believe the relief that's wrapped up in those words...) and will be back on Monday.
  
  It hurts. I don't even get to be there to see her one last time. It hurts worse that the person who is "representing" this branch of the family is the one of us whose feelings about this are summed up by such quotes as "at least this is the last money she'll ever cost me" and "what does it matter if you know where she's buried? what're you going to do, lie down in the grave with her?"
  
  'Nuff said.
  
  With that said, though - I'm all right. I'm not so silly as to think I'm unshakable, but I'm not in danger of going over the edge without something major and disastrous happening in addition to this. The last thing she'd have wanted would have been for me to blow months of stability over her.
  
  Somebody asked what we'd want said at our funerals. Someone else asked who we are, and still someone else wondered about what we wanted.
  
  I don't have answers for all of that. Who I am is a work in progress. I'd like to believe that what I am includes traits such as caring, strength, honesty and loyalty. I know it also includes descriptions such as afraid, depressed, hasty, vengeful, and oversensitive.
  
  What I want said about me - and not at a funeral; I don't want one and I don't trust eulogies to be wholly unromanticised anyway - is that I lived my life the best way I could. That I did more good than harm, that I didn't waste more of the moments I was gifted with than I had to. That I used the knowledge I had and the experience I earned, and created more than I destroyed.
  
  And as for what I want... well. I want to live. With all that entails. It's a pretty shallow person who never experiences pain. And to experience pain, you have to have first had joy. I've had my fair share of both; I don't think there's anything in my life I would do without, if doing without it meant avoiding some pain somewhere down the line. "I wish I'd never" is a thought that only comes in the middle of the worst pain, and the gods close their ears to such prayers when they love us. What I want is the grace and strength to face whatever comes, and be glad of it.