On
Saturday, I attended the
funeral of my research director's mother. While funerals are always
difficult affairs, this one was made particularly so due to the fact that I found out that my own Grandmother was
hospitalized on Friday. Given that the two women were of the same age and suffered from the same
ailments, what should have been a somber occasion was in fact quite a
personally difficult one.
I really do appreciate and admire my research supervisor. He is a decent, forthcoming man who allowed us to see his appreciation and sorrow at the funeral. His eulogy was a beautiful, concise ode to his mother and his family, and it touched me deeply. However, during the ceremony there was a moment of silence as the priest played a selection from Handel's Messiah. Listening to that most beautiful of pieces of music, I was overcome with a sense of passing, and thus was not as surprised as I might have otherwise been when, upon returning home, I found out that my grandmother had passed away in the morning. In fact, she likely died while I was mourning the passing of another.
Clara Bence née Stricker (1912-2001) passed on the morning of Saturday the 31st of March, leaving behind three children, five grandchildren and a great-grandson. She was a kind, decent and funny individual, who like so many of her generation demonstrated her love amply in her own reserved way. To eulogize her, I would like to paraphrase my research supervisor:
Clara Bence died of pneumonia, that intimate friend of alzheimer's disease, which so often and so gently allows an elderly person to leave this life with some degree of dignity.