a sad day

Today was my grandmother's funeral. It was a lovely service. It brought people together in a completely unexpected way. But as only Cooley family gatherings can, it brought both a sense of closeness with a paradoxical distance. It reminded me of the ties that are still here in California and always will be here. It stirred up the pull of familial relations - especially those that are unresolved in one way or another. And it brought up the inevitable questions of what I will leave behind if a family remains out of reach.

I feel like my family wanted to explain my life these days in a soundbite that I just couldn't bring myself to give. I couldn't make it simple for them and ended up feeling emotional about trying to say that our life is hard. That its hard to feel like I have failed at medical school. I needed to say that I worry about asking too much and expecting too much from my husband. And that I don't know what my life will become and that I find that unbearably scary and unfair all at the same time.

But at the same time, today is not the day for tears about my own life, but tears about the life that was lost. And maybe for the first time I am certain that she loved all of us. And maybe that should be enough for today.