Surprising Myself

Last year at around this time my Mum decided to end her life. It might seem a bit weird that I'm phrasing it in that particular way, "decided to end her life", but I've struggled a lot with trying to find a suitable way of expressing the action. I hate it when people try to put it euphemistically by saying she died "tragically" or even worse, that she "passed on" or "passed away". I can't stand everything that "passed on" suggests: that it was 'just another step along the way', that it was somehow majestic or even beautiful; everything that it wasn't, basically. I also don't like saying it in a complete matter-of-fact way, because that can be pretty upsetting at times too. I think the way I've found to say it is very appropriate; honest, definite, but not going into unnecessary detail and not prettying it up.

That's something that I've put a bit of thought into, but it's veering off the point a bit, so I'll continue. The anniversary of her death is coming up later this month, but it hasn't really been bothering me as much as I thought it might. In fact, I wasn't even thinking about it at all until a few nights ago, when it came up as a matter of practicality. Dad and Granny want the engraving on her gravestone to be done before the anniversary, and my sis C and I were given a draft of the text as written by my Granny to look over. Dad was clearly not pleased with the way Granny had phrased it and the reason for this was very obvious to both of us immediately, so he was hoping for us to feed him back his own opinion on it.

At first I didn't really care about it; I was pretty exhausted at the time. I liked Dad's version a lot more than I did Granny's, so I just told him whatever they decided was fine. In any case, all that stuff -visiting the grave with flowers and looking at the lovely inscription etc.- never seemed important to me in the slightest, completely detached as it is from my Mum. He told C and I to think about it for a few days and come back to him. And sure enough, over those few days as I turned the thing over and over in my mind I started to find that no, I wasn't that pleased with either version of things. Typical. When he came back to me last night, I completely surprised myself by getting pretty fired up about it. I said that I wouldn't let Granny pick an engraving that we wouldn't all agree on and that I wouldn't concede even a single word. Despite my dad agreeing with a version that I had come up with completely, he rather pathetically suggested that we " compromise" over the issue, that we should "pick our battles". Bollox to that! After all, C and I are going to be looking at whatever inscription we choose for a lot longer than either Dad or Granny. "But Granny is old, it's hard for her". "She's only thinking of Mum". Those were Dad's two main points on the issue, the former of which is just an equivocation that Granny might use to justify herself but not one I'll be fooled by, and the latter is just not true. So in the end, I told Dad this is what we want, tell Granny that, and we can discuss things with her if she wants, and if she doesn't like it she can piss off(except maybe not that last part).

Oh, and I surprised myself again today by having a really great audition for our school's music competition (I play the piano), on the kind of occasion where I usually fall apart horribly and scream abuse at the piano, which doesn't usually win me many gold stars...Roll on the final!