About the Cranes....

That's about a thousand origami cranes, spread out on my bed a few years ago and photographed from above. Cropped from the photo is my black and white cat, Iala, who was trying very hard to grab one to chew on while my partner was taking the pictures. Just in case you were wondering what the whole crane thing ends up looking like. Usually I keep them in a huge box, though, because while I don't sleep much, my partner does, and kind of likes the bed without paper all over it. Picky, picky. I've got bigger photos of that on my computer, and photos of other sets of cranes I mailed off, though I didn't think to get any of the thousand pink ones I sent to Code Pink, and I like to crop the photos into large squares and print them out and fold them into cranes. Some of the cranes in that photo are made from paper with a traditional folded crane, or Orizuru, design on them. And some of the cranes in later photos are made from paper printed with this photo. And some of those....

Since early 2004, I've folded 20180 cranes, plus whatever I folded away from home and didn't always count or remember how many, and whatever's sitting in the little box by my desk here that I haven't counted yet. The box is about half full, depending on the paper sizes, that's probably from a hundred fifty to three hundred cranes. It's just what I do.

In a comment down there, RobW said he was picturing a flock of multicolored birds. So that's what that looks like. I did send a bunch of them to a peace march in SF years ago, and they sent a bunch of them, not just mine but a lot of peoples', out on the tides. with little folded boats and candles.

From Sadako.com, here's a pdf so you can fold your own. Here's a non-pdf of instructions from Operation Peace Crane. It might end up being what you do, too.

Meanwhile, I have to figure out how to make this thing default to a sans-serif font, and show the actual time where I am.

No More the Insane, Memory Lane Runs in the Other Direction

There's rarely anything to say to someone at a funeral beyond, "I'm sorry". Sometimes you can get by with "I'm *so* sorry". But there's also rarely anything you can say in response to "I'm sorry". Phoenician in a Time of Romans went with "That sucks", which is actually what I've been saying all week. It's got sincerity, accuracy, and even some novelty going for it, though it is possibly not something that goes over too well in a church funeral.

Catholic funerals are odd, too. It's essentially a mass, like any other Sunday, except that there's this body doing centerpiece duty, in much the same way that you sometimes get a Christmas tree or Easter lilies or whatever front and center. For most of the mass, they close it and put a drape over it, in the way that military funerals use flags. And it mostly just sits there and is referred to from time to time, but, just until the end, generally in an allusionary fashion. In fact, if you aren't familiar with Catholic funerals, you might get the impression that the funeral mass is being said for Jesus.

It's a little hard to connect the big shiny box with someone who helped raised you, someone who you were named after, someone who always found something to love about you even when you were at your most unlovable. It's hard to connect the shiny box under the ecumenical tablecloth with someone you've seen telling jokes, or sick with the flu, with the arms you remember always being wrapped around you, with the hands that taught you to do things. It's really hard to connect it with the voice.

It was for me, anyway. I hadn't seen her in over a year, and that's my fault. I live away from my extended family, and we don't get along that well. Or, rather, we get along best at a distance of at least a couple hundred miles, where we don't talk often enough to get into fights, or to deal with any of the mistakes we've all made that are past correcting. Of course, it's a mistake in and of itself that can't be corrected, but you have to balance it with the other mistakes it keeps you from making. Family is complicated that way. No decision gets made in a vacuum; there are always good and bad reasons to do or not do anything. You make your choice and you accept the consequences.

For my part, I know that they're disappointed with what I am. I may overestimate the amount of disappointment, but maybe not. And I can't make them understand that I'm *not* disappointed with what I am. My grandmother was never disappointed with me. Or at least she never let it show, which is all I would have asked for. But I'll be the first to admit that it hasn't gone the way any of us expected it to go, and I expected her to be disappointed with me, which it didn't seem like either of us needed.

I'm not giving her enough credit, of course. She was never anything but generous in every way, and I'm sure she'd have found something to be pleased about even with me. I'm not sure why I didn't give her the chance, but I would guess it was a decision based more on the rest of the factors involved in family visits.

We're already well into TMI territory here, but I dissociate a lot, and it still doesn't entirely feel real. That's going to take some time, I know. At some point, I'll start dealing with it, and at some point I'll figure out how, and at some point things will go mostly back to normal. It hurts right now, but not in the way that I know it will later.

Funerals are strange, anyway. Not just Catholic ones. I understand what the point is, or at least half of it. I know we're gathering together to in some way honor the person who's died, but I have to admit I've never seen how it helps to be standing over a collection of minerals in a fancy box. If there's something after this, the dead have moved on already by the time we start buying them flowers. If there's not, there probably isn't much point anyway. To be honest, it would have made more sense to me to send the flowers to my mother, who is still around to enjoy them. And that's where the other part of a funeral comes in, the part I get but can't help with. We're there to comfort each other in grief. I understand that. But, it's not something I know how to do. The offline me doesn't have a delete and a save key, and is poorly medicated to boot. It's socially inept and just says incredibly stupid and thoughtless things (even the online me does that on a regular basis, and it *does* have a delete key and a review function). But it just makes people feel worse, including myself. Nobody needs extra stress at a funeral, or any other time.

Funerals give me no closure. They merely delay the point where I stop trying to plan out things and stop trying to be who I'm not, and actually get down to remembering, and grieving. The distraction is welcome, the additional stress is not.

My mother took the flowers that I had sent to the funeral home with her, as it's Lent, and there can't be flowers left in the church for masses. She decided to do it without any prompting from me, so hopefully it actually was something that helps her. They were a basket of mixed purple ones. It was somewhat short notice because I am not an organized person, but I think my grandmother would have liked the purple, and I liked the basket because I think of death, or at least I want to think of death, as a journey, as moving from one place to another. Cranes symbolize that for me, beyond the traditional associations, and so do flowers or plants in carriers, with handles. I'm sure that sounds stupid, but so do most spiritual and religious things, I guess.

The other interesting thing that sometimes gets done at funerals is that after the casket is lowered into the grave, the family and friends are invited to throw a handful of dirt into the grave. It's part of making a funeral into a celebration, because this person will be resurrected, so it's not really like death is permanent, and you're just helping Grandma to her next thing, and glad that she's "with Jesus now". I kind of suspect it's the sort of thing that your priest or other religious leader tells you you believe, and you maybe go along with it, even if you have your doubts. There's better comfort, but there's colder, too. Since I believe in reincarnation, I tend to view it as burying a dried flower that's got strong seeds in it. Either way, I do think my grandmother would have appreciated that symbolism.

There may be more later, or there may not be. Again, don't feel any compulsion to try to dream up something useful to say. You'll get stuck at "I'm sorry", and I'll have to say "Yeah, me too", and it seems to save us all a lot of angst if we just assume it's all been said already. I will say, and I maybe should have said it before, that if you have something you actually *want* to say, that's okay. Sometimes it takes us a long time to think through things and when we've come to a particular revelation about something, the rest of the world has moved on and we have to just fit it into our mental attics and try to catch up. Epiphanies don't just drop neatly into casual conversations, I've noticed. I just didn't want anyone feeling like they had to come up with something to say that hadn't been said before. This is a blog, not a greeting card. Speak up when you want, and the rest of the time I'll just rant to myself, and maybe a bit to my grandmother and other people you can't see, now and then.

The title of this post is taken from the song "Cemetery Row" off of the self-titled/untitled album by The Minus Five, sometimes referred to as "The Gun Album". You can get yours here. I've loved it since it came out, but this last week it's been exceptionally comforting in ways that are very hard to define. My taste in music is awful at best, but this one really is good, and it's not just me saying it. (Edited for direct link.)

Interruption

Okay, this is one of those things that nobody has to read, nobody wants to read, but I have to say it anyway. Feel free to stop reading now.

My grandmother died this morning. She was important, our relationship was increasingly strained which is my fault, but she was a very good woman, and her presence on the planet often made me think our species didn't suck as badly as it could have. She had Alzheimer's the last several years, and it was complicated by a lot of things, and as my mother put it this morning, she was probably about ready to move on to the next thing for her.

Whether anyone was ready to let her go is another issue, and not one that ultimately
matters that much.

My relationship with my family is equally complicated, and the funeral is going to make that worse, but I guess we'll see what happens.

In any event, I absolutely don't need expressions of sympathy. It'll get sorted out, eventually, and I'm not interested in guilting people who don't even really know me, let alone her, into spending time trying to think of something useful to say, plus I can't be bothered to try to think up useful ways to respond. Don't worry about it, really.

Me, I'm one of those reincarnation-type pagans, and I suspect she'd quite like to be grasses or waves on an ocean beach in Oregon, where we used to go sometimes, for a while, so I'm going to keep thinking about that, and it will help. So will Sunrise Earth (Possible noise at link), which I've got piles of episodes DVRd and will help give me a good way to think about this, especially the beach ones.

But the blogroll thing will likely be postponed for a bit unless I finish with SE and have a manic upswing, so all of you six people who were hoping for the two hits next month that being on my illustrious blogroll can bring you, maybe April.

Anyway, there it is, and now I'm going to go fold a lot of cranes and try to think up something to do with them that will honor my grandmother.

Good heavens, there are people in my comments section!

Hi, y'all, and thanks for coming to see me. Here, have some huckleberry jellybeans and Tab.

R, I thank you for your comments, and I continue to be baffled by people who appreciate my comments, but I am also highly easily amused by these things as well.

As far as the headache diary thing goes, it's annoying. I've been told that a lot of people get better with time, but it's really been going the other way for me. They started out just regular headaches, and somehow ended up with what is generously called chronic daily headache. Basically, I've had the same headache, literally, since 1990. No, really. It does not go away. Ever. That's tedious, and no one needs to hear about it. I've been through all the neurologists and all the meds, and it's boring, just plain damned boring. It gets progressively worse, and I get progressively used to it, so in effect it's pretty much stable. A couple years later, I got hit by some driver who apparently viewed crosswalks as mere guidelines, and since then it's been migraines. About the time I gave up on trying to find a solution to that, I managed to concuss myself and now I get what are apparently clusters, which have also been getting worse. So by now the ER knows me pretty well. My new neurologist seems to hate me for not being something she knows how to fix, and didn't like my headache diary, which consisted quite graphically of Things I'd Rather Be Doing Than Have This Headache. In the meantime, there was a psychologist who felt that the migraines were the result of my PTSD, and spent months trying to convince me that I have repressed raisin-related memories. (Raisins are a trigger. As are peanuts, popcorn, and most of my favorite scents.) There was also the neurologist who felt that my refusal to contemplate acupuncture until I'm presented with actual studies showing it works better than placebo means the headaches can't be that bad, and the housemate who assumes I'm exaggerating to annoy her, because, obviously, if I really did have a migraine, I'd be hiding in my closet. (Let's put it this way. I have chronic daily migraines. If I spent all my time dealing with them, I'd never do *anything*. As it is, I'm simply unemployed.)

At this point, the solution is to avoid the obvious triggers, carry around with me my phone number and other information I forget when I have a bad one, neither expect nor promise much of myself, go to the ER for the clusters after a week, get CT scans and glaucoma tests once a year to rule out stupid shit, and periodically succumb to fits of optimism that some neurologist somewhere will have something that accidentally ends up working, since none of the rational things have. Sooner or later, someone will hit on something, and it will turn out to be completely random.

Okay, that was incredibly boring and lame, and I'll try never to do that again.

To make it all up to you, let me give you this cool site, which has piles of free paper toys to print out and build. I just did the fishstand, I've been doing all of their little shops and houses at seventy five percent scale which is pretty much exactly the right size for my Playmobil people. And do check out Herr Doktor's link to Flying Pig. The Flying Spaghetti Monster is adorable, I built that today. The Flying Pig models aren't free, the Paper Museum ones are, they're all cool.

I promise to work on a blogroll, though. That seems like something worth doing.