Nathan accused me yesterday of having no emotions whatsoever. According to him, "It's like you're not effected at all". What am I supposed to do in the face of Tennyson's Crossing the Bar and A Christian's Good Night? The latter is only a good night, and the former a sailor's call to the sea with a hope for no moaning. To carry on like my uncle's girlfriend did was out of character entirely.
Funerals, as I have learned from the many I have gone to, are not a place for tears, especially in the case of the end of a painful illness. Why cry over a man who (as he said) was ready to travel again and knew where he was going?
His children are busy fighting over discussing (we're not supposed to acknowledge what they're actually doing) what's to be done with the furniture and the house and my grandmother. I think I actually came out the best. My grandfather was a storyteller and I am the one who got his stories. All his notebooks of stories and poems have been promised to me as they turn up.
Reading through the one I have right now, every single time a death is recorded there is a peculiar story to go with it. It's is fitting, then, that he made one last story before he died.
There is a famous image by Albert Durer which he called "Hands", though it is more commonly known as "The Praying Hands". On Wednesday morning, when my relatives visited him, my grandfather asked them, in full cognizance, where the praying hands had gone.
He went on to relate that all of the previous night he had seen a luminescent image of Durer's Praying Hands upon the wall opposite his bed, where no such image stood.
He died Thursday morning.
We're funny that way, my family.