06.30.03 - 12:19 p.m.

Whenever my mother gets here, we've leaving for grandma's funeral. The cat is already in his cat carrier - Mom was supposed to pick me up twenty minutes ago, but she's running late. I'm glad i wait and called her before i set off the flea bombs (cat has fleas. you know how bad it would be after a week? bleh) and sat outside to wait for her.

I don't want to go to this. I didn't sleep last night. At seven a.m. I went to the laundromat, and zombied around there long enough to get some clean clothes. Then i came back and showed and packed. And vaccuumed, while the price is right ran in the background. Kathryn Hepburn, my grandmother, Lester Maddox, Maynard Jackson, Strom Thurmond, and that old lech Bob Barker is still alive and shooting that goddamned show. I'd trade her for him.

I know I'm going to breakdown. A viewing. I can't stand viewings. I don't know why we have them. They're awful things: just bodies. My grandfather, when he died - it was the same year as the challenger disaster. Actually, it was just a few days before the Challenger disaster because I was at Grandma's for the funeral when the disaster happened - we went to the viewing, and he looked so waxy and small and empty. My grandmother's been looking smaller and smaller the last few years - her hands bothered her, she couldn't manage jars anymore. Making cookies at Christmas time was a difficult chore, but she still did it. Her hands were blunt, her knuckles notched. Her hair was thin and fine, and she stopped dying it years ago, long before I remember. The pictures of my grandparents from the mid-70s, when they came to visit us in Georgia when I was a baby, a pre-schooler, all show her with dark hair, but I only remember her with white hair.

She was still vigorous in her sixties and seventies. When I was eighteen we took a trip out west - to the Grand Canyon, Zion National Park, Bryce Canyon, all over the place. She was almost 80 then, but she hiked down through Bryce Canyon without a problem. It was only in the last five to six years that she started a decline into genuine old age that seemed so sudden. Five years ago, she considered ending the tradition of Thanksgiving at her house, letting Aunt Barbara take over, but she wanted Tim and Brian to have memories of going to Grandma's at Thanksgiving, so she managed it every year since. Admittedly, Aunt Barbara came over to help her get ready the week before every year, but on Thanksgiving, there she would be, always up and working on everything. She always made me artichokes stuffed with couscous.

She was so brusque and blunt in some ways. Her letters - when she wrote she left out the subject, usually - were much the same. No-nonsense. I suppose you get that when your mother dies when you're eight, and you have three younger siblings to take care of and you lived on a farm in Nebraska in the 1920s.

She got away eventually, though, when she was 25 or 26, to Pittsburgh for nursing school at Mercy Hospital. I think my grandfather's employment tended to be inconstant, so she worked midnight shift and took care of her kids during the day. Four of them, she had between 30 and 42.

Aunt Dorothy and Uncle Jerome - her younger brother and sister, twins - are coming to the funeral. Dad went up early to meet them. Grandma had one younger brother - the youngest - who died at thirteen from appendicitis.

I'm going to miss her, so very much.