Away From School

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< ?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = ""urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags"" />10/05/2004

I intend to upload this, along with another philosophy journal as soon as I find a connection to the internet. I’m in my Grandma’s house right now, I just came back from the visitation of my grandfathers body. Tomorrow is the burial and funeral. It all seems to be a bit much right now. It’s odd, the reaction I felt when I stood at the door to the funeral home sanctuary. It was fear.

I received the call at < ?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = ""urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags"" />1:30PM on Sunday. I was in the park enjoying a pizza with Becca. In a few short sentences that I cannot now recall, my mom told me that Grandpa, my Dad’s Dad, had passed away. The whole family knew that it was going to happen, he had been steadily declining in health for the past 3 years. In the past few months he had been in the hospital recovering from surgery. He never really recovered. The doctors realized this and did what they could to keep him from getting worse, and ease his suffering. He was suffering. I’m sure that most people do suffer before the end, too often people suffer for great lengths of time fighting a battle which everyone eventually loses.

When I first saw Grandma this afternoon she said tearfully, “He just couldn’t breathe anymore.” I held her close, the way she had hugged me when she was as much taller than me as I am to her now. Painful words, those words that Grandma uttered, feeling the need to explain what had happened. Why hadn’t seemed important to me before, I only had thought about the fact that it had finally happened.

When I looked down from my phone after I hung up with my Mom Sunday afternoon, I noticed with the one part of my mind that wasn’t numbed that my cell phone said 1:30 referring to the total length of the call, and then the numbers stayed the same when the display switched back to showing the current time. That’s one of those strange minute details that my mind picked up on and it will probably be burned into my memory for a long time. One minute and thirty seconds was all the longer it took for me to find out about the passing of my Grandpa. One hour and thirty minutes past noon on October Third. There is no real significance to that, other than the fact that my mind felt it necessary to catalogue a little detail like that. Was it some sort of psychological defense mechanism perhaps? Give me some coincidence to process while I try to absorb the raw fact of what I just learned. I was really in pretty good shape the whole time up until I got here this afternoon. No real heavy feelings of hurt or depression at all.

I was afraid this evening, afraid of walking through those doors, past those pews to what was waiting in the front of that little sanctuary. I could see his head above the edge of the casket from outside, and I froze. I didn’t want to come to grips with reality. I had avoided the harshness of this particular reality until now. There is something devastatingly real about a dead body. Reality hits you like a ton of bricks when you see something like that.

Once the reality set in I was able to absorb the reality of it all and eventually the tears stopped, and I could distract myself by talking to some friends that had come up. It helped to talk to people that I was close with and do normal things at a time like that, It made coping much easier, the whole thing became much less strange, and I no longer feared too look at him.

Once the human reaction had subsided I was able to look at the spiritual side and received a great deal of comfort from the fact that Grandpa had come to know Christ a little over a month ago. Dad was able to bring him to a personal relationship with Jesus, and that fact helps a great deal. I know now that Grandpa Bendt is enjoying a perfect body and worshiping with joy in heaven right now. His spirit is secure for eternity, because of this I feel peace tonight.

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10/06/2004

The funeral for grandpa was today. It was much easier to deal with this just like any other sad occurrence in life. That is, after the reality of it all had set in. Grandma was handling things better after it was all over with. I don’t know what she will do once the family slowly trickles away. Mom, my sister and myself left a few hours after the funeral reception was over. I am driving back to Kearney tomorrow morning. At which point I should be able to post this since I didn’t have time to find a hotspot today. I suppose the reason I wrote the somewhat overly dramatic post above this is because this has been first real encounter with the death of someone that I know and love. I wasn’t the closest with my Grandpa, but he was still close family. As one of only 3 grandchildren, we got to spend quite a bit of time with Grandpa and Grandma. In fact my sister and I were the only grandchildren that they saw more than once every other year.