Grandmother's funeral today

My wife’s grandmother died. Our weeks holiday interrupted to mourn the death of a generation now gone. She was ready to go, senile and out of character. The indignity of watching her become aggressive and belligerent were not memories one wanted to keep but they are the most current. After her husband died a few years ago all she has been wanting is to go and be with him. She did not want to live any longer. She encouraged family to slowly take away her life’s possessions, one item at a time. There are lists of “what I want” from the expensive crystal to the very last of handbags and brooches. It was as if she was stripped before she died. How difficult it was to go and visit her, she wouldn’t remember you and how easy it was to say, “What’s the point!” The family will gather today to remember her, but we do not mourn her death, that would be a selfish clinging to somebody who had already ‘left the building’ before she died. We instead are remembering how we were with her, we remember our moments and opportunities, some taken some missed. We mourn today the human malady of dying, decaying, the debilitating realization that we are mortal.