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Location: Northern California

Thursday, January 12, 2006

 

Butterflies mean life

We celebrated my grandmother's life yesterday in Woodstock, Illinois. I flew out of town for less than 48 hours and spend an emotional--but good--couple of days with family and family friends. Over 300 people attended her funeral and many tears were shed for this wonderful woman, my grandmother. I would be lying if I wrote that saying goodbye was easy, but I know that it was necessary, and I do feel better now. Now I can say, "My grandmother passed away last Sunday," without bursting into tears and making the poor grocery store clerk feel like crap when all he asked me was, "How's it going?"

The night before I left for Chicago, I sifted through a couple of boxes of photos, cried my eyes out, and made a photo collage for my gramie. I found a letter she had written me where she had embellished the inside of the notecard with the words "Butterflies mean life." I made her words the theme of the collage, which you can see below. The piece of paper with her note on it is in the lower right hand corner although it's hard to read it in this photo. Another photo in the collage has the caption "It's a Celebration," and it was; both her life and her death was a celebration. We displayed the collage on an easel at her funeral along with other pictures, collages, and flower arrangements that various family members had put together.


What a week... I'm making a promise to both myself and you that tomorrow I will return to my regularly scheduled programming, my rants and raves about mothering, books, writing, and the occasional organizing frenzy.