For the past two weeks I’ve been stuck in a mini-post rut. I dilemma if you will.
A couple of weeks ago my grandfather passed away back in Ireland, which meant a return home at short notice. I brought Herself and +1 along too, because Herself really liked my grandfather and we’ve a lot to be grateful to him for. We could hardly have left +1 at home now could we?
The dilemma has been how to write about it, because initially I wanted to say something about it. I’ve already started a 1,500 word post on this experience, but it is just a stream of and-then-this-happened-and-then-this-happened-and-then-this-happened. Maybe you or someone else would have liked to read this, but I just couldn’t finish writing it and had to stop. It’s not because it made me sad, it was something else.
It was an emotional return for several reasons. First, we had to come and say goodbye to my grandfather, a man we hadn’t seen in a year and half, but whom we both loved dearly. Secondly, we had to return for the first time in a year and half, and this is something we’d been hoping on doing for a year and half. Third, we had to bring +1 to see everyone, and this was perhaps the most amazing part of the journey, but we had hoped that we could introduce the two of them to each other when we go back to Ireland this summer. In terms of knowing how to react it was difficult.
We should have been sad, but it was hard to mourn. It wasn’t a black and white happy -v- sad thing, that’s not how we do it in Ireland. I’m already going on again.
Still, the more I think of this the more difficult it has been to make this post which I was crafting into something. I think in the end I’ve decided to keep this event, essentially, private. It will be something that you’ll know happened but I will keep the finer points to myself, family, and friends.
That’s all I wanted to say.
That being said I don’t want to let everything I wrote to sit and rot in a folder in my computer. Here are a few snippets and thoughts which cropped up while drafting the longer post.
- The cursing was not because I would be going back to Ireland. My grandfather was notorious enough in his own way, but he had always been a source of gentle encouragement, antagonism, and support over the years, and since I married I don’t think that myself and Herself could be in our present position without his help.
- We bought my ticket first, but then we realised that this was not a journey which I could do alone. After a few hours of rummaging around we eventually managed to pay for another pair of tickets for both Herself and +1. At three in the morning we finally went to bed, and for some reason I set my alarm for nine, but fortunately our natural alarm clock (a.k.a. our five month old baby girl) had us up before seven. We set to packing and eventually we managed to pull ourselves together and made it to the airport bus, and to catch our flight in plenty of time.
- For parents traveling with an infant for the first time on a flight that would last a combined length of fourteen hours, the scene was set for the unpredictable. In hindsight this was good. We are travelling back to Ireland in the summer, but with over two months to ‘plan’ the journey, I would not doubt for a second that we would have worried ourselves into taking the bus eventually. Fortunately there is no surer cure to nerves than having to do something without thinking.
The death of a loved one or family member is never easy, but we had travelled across the globe for a funeral of someone who we had not seen in a year and a half. This was also someone who was quite unwell. When we last left Ireland in the summer of 2011 myself and Herself tried to say goodbye properly but the last memory we have of my grandfather alive was of him boarding a bus to go on a trip with the other people who he was now living with in the care centre where he lived out the last of his days. He was in such a position that he didn’t know much better and my old man told us not to worry over it, and that it was better like this. Of course you can never really know the best way, and we will not know as none of our family got a chance to properly say good bye to him as he passed away in his sleep.
When we arrived everyone was caught between two emotions. Sorrow at my grandfather’s passing, but also delight and gratitude for our arrival, which I think this was multiplied greatly by the arrival of cooing and gurgling +1, who revelled in the attention of so many new faces.
So anyway, that’s it. Back to normal now. Oh, except for the fact that +1 is still jetlagged. Fan-fuckin-tastic.
