"I suppose I came into this world sleepy, and I'm going out sleepy, too."
-Caroline Victoria Jenson
My aunt passed away last Thursday in her sleep at the age of 92. She is six years older than her sister and my grandmother, Norma Jurisson. My mom, grandmother, and I drove down to Kansas City, Kansas this week for Vicky's funeral. I hadn't met my cousins on that side of the family so the trip actually made for an interesting family reunion. Vivky will be buried in Norge, Virginia on July 8th.
Our family handles death in a very interesting way I suppose. When my grandfather, Jaan Jurisson died, with a sandwich in his hand from a massive heart attack, we all gained a sense of humor to carry us through rough times. Tradition and our ability to be labeled "cheap" with absolutely no guilt whatsoever forces us to buy caskets "one up from welfare." When my grandfather died my uncle Karl, my mom and dad went to the funeral home where the man kept attempting to go through his sales pitch for the ridiculously over-priced pine boxes while Karl and mom kept walking past the caskets crossing their chests with their arms asking "how would this look?" My father, I can guarantee, was truly embarrassed. I can see his bald head turning cherry red right now. The morning of the funeral, my aunt Mary and my mom were in the bathroom getting ready when they heard a "BOOM!" My grandmother was in the kitchen finishing up a few things. Mary looked over at mom and quickly uttered, "You go check." Mom responded with, "You're the doctor, you go check." What was said next would be considered the punch-line of the joke, "But she's MY mom!" Anyway, Mary and mom went to see that THEIR mother had fallen in hopes that she wasn't dead too. Grandma was face-down on the tile floor. She attended the funeral with two black eyes and a squished nose. Grandma told people at the funeral that she and her husband got into a fight and she won.
My grandfather never believed in cut flowers for a funeral, what was he going to need cut flowers for when hes dead!? Therefor, his wife and children brought a single green plant with no flowers on it to the funeral and placed it next to his casket. I can only imagine the thoughts running through his friend's minds when they saw the lone plant his family had brought to the party.
On another note, I have been reading a book titled, "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" about Richard P. Feynman, a physicist born in 1918. Feynman had an alternative way of looking at life, he won the Nobel Price in Physics and taught at Caltech until he passed away in 1988. The book is a series of short stories from his point of view about getting into trouble and experiencing life in "all its eccentric glory." Feynman "traded ideas on atomic physics with Einstein and Bohr, cracked the uncrackable safes protecting the most deeply held nuclear secrets and accompanied a ballet on his bongo drums."
Maybe through reading about such an open-minded, free, person such as Feynman, we can all learn about living life first and worrying about death later.
