Days like this are, of course, not easy

I attend­ed my grand­fa­ther’s memo­r­i­al ser­vice today, and said a few words in front of the gath­er­ing about grief and loss being pre­cious. I felt tongue-tied but I stood up and said my piece. When I fum­bled for words, I stopped and breathed and remind­ed myself that it just does­n’t mat­ter how slow­ly I talk or how much silence I let pass between sentences.

We came back to the fam­i­ly home for din­ner, which includ­ed humor­ous but very awk­ward jabs at my cousin and myself for not yet hav­ing chil­dren. Rob is at least mar­ried; I’m way behind despite being five years old­er. A few jabs and we made light of it and had a good laugh, but then it real­ly went on too long. The bet­ter part of a half hour was devot­ed to our fail­ures to father chil­dren. I was start­ing to get worn down. For­tu­nate­ly I did­n’t blow up or anything.

It was real­ly won­der­ful to see Rob. He’s turned into a great guy, and very much his own man even though, yes, he reminds me of his father. I’d like very much to be in bet­ter touch.

When I was here last, I remem­ber being frus­trat­ed that all of the pic­tures of me on the walls of my fam­i­ly’s hous­es includ­ed a pic­ture of me with Vik­ki. Vis­it­ing fam­i­ly for the first time after the break-up and see­ing her face every­where I went was very painful.

Today, look­ing at the pic­tures on the refrig­er­a­tor here, I found that por­trait pho­to of myself and Vik­ki, which had been cut irreg­u­lar­ly so that it was just me. Of course, it’s obvi­ous that some­one has been cut out, and some­one’s hand is rest­ing on my shoul­der. See­ing that now was, I think, more painful than it would have been if it had just been the old pho­to. I feel guilty and fool­ish for hav­ing let any­one know that I was upset about see­ing the pho­tos three years ago, as if it were my fault. This assumes that some­one cut her out of the pho­to­graph in response to my com­plaint and I don’t know whether that’s a good assump­tion. In any case, it made me sad to see.

I also remem­ber this house being larg­er. It is a very large house, of course, but I remem­ber not being able to reach the coun­ter­tops. It’s curi­ous to me that even though I’ve been here sev­er­al times in adult­hood, today was the first time I’ve been sur­prised by the scale of the things (and peo­ple) I remem­ber being larg­er. Odd to think of being “right-sized” in rela­tion to phys­i­cal things.

I’m still on Cal­i­for­nia time so of course ever­ry­one else is long asleep, but I should try to sleep so that I don’t have too much trou­ble get­ting up tomorrow.