My grandmother died last Wednesday. The funeral was on Sunday. It was the first funeral I'd ever attended. For most of it, it was just her lying in the casket, with my father, brother, sister and me just kind of milling about, all of us oddly upbeat. (Probably denial on my dad's part.)

A few of her friends and nurses from her assisted living place stopped by to view the corpse and express condolences. They spoke fondly of her and made frequent references to what a good, nice old lady she was. She spent most of the last 22 years (since her retirement from teaching second grade) without any friends or peers, so having in her a nursing home probably brought her out of her shell a bit. But beyond those people, nobody showed up. Not too surprising, really, since all her friends and peers her age are either immobile due to age, ill or dying themselves, or couldn't arrange transportation from the nursing home to the funeral home. Apart from having to wear a suit, it was mostly casual. No one cried. A few left flowers. My own statement to her corpse, lying in its oaken casket:

"I hope you find contentment in the next dimension over that seemed to elude you in this one. Please enjoy it."

She was cremated on Monday, and my dad has tentative plans to take the ashes, along with those of his father/her husband, up to Harbor Beach, Michigan, on the shores of Lake Huron, where she had a cottage built in the 1950s and has owned (but not maintained) since then to scatter them there as per his father's wish before he died in 1970. My sister found his ashes while going through some of her stuff late last week, after apparently having spent the past 38 years in a box with a bunch of her old lady junk.

Her clothes will all be donated to Goodwill. Some of her furniture (basically whatever we can't use) will either be donated or sold. Her properties in Destin, Florida and the aforementioned Harbor Beach will eventually be sold, and her ample stockpile of, well, stocks, will be transferred to my dad, who hasn't decided what to do with them yet. The properties must both be processed through probate (due to her unwillingness to revise her will), which could take a few months. Her will was last updated when my dad was 25—in 1973-74—and all her assets were left to him... in trust. But he's old enough now (60) to be able to bypass that, so my siblings and I will have our inheritances pretty soon, most likely. I don't know how much money to expect, but I'll be happy with anything. I mean, it wasn't my money or properties or stocks or whatever. She could've just willed it all to some charity or some relative I've never met and probably never will, though I'm not sure if she even has any living relatives apart from my siblings and father. So we've got that going for us, which is nice. The last thing that needs to be done after all the rest of the paperwork is complete is for my dad to file her tax return next year.

I'm kind of surprised that she actually died. She was a hard old lady. I thought she'd make it to 90 at least, but no, at 87 she just broke down like a jalopy and then died a week later, of kidney failure. The only relative I'd known for my whole life, apart from my immediate family, has died. I'm OK with it, though. Everybody's gotta go sometime. And last Wednesday was her time.

Helene K. Anderson
June 24, 1921 – September 22, 2008