Oh me oh my.
It seems that between getting nervous and nervouser and worrying about stuff, April has passed me by and life’s made its way to May.
May…. that fickle, wonderful month of May.
One of my favorite songs ever has that perfect line that makes girls wish the song had been written about them,
“…when it’s cold outside, I’ve got the month of May…”
Confess. You want to be “My Girl.” I don’t mean the cheezball movie– I’ve never even seen it. But there is that feeling of evoking such a beautiful song with gorgeous harmonies– a spring dream. Every girl wants to be a spring dream.
I sort-of married in the spring too– our second-second anniversary is coming up, May 15th.
A good friend will be married on the 13th….. a most joyous occasion that sounds out of a storybook. I wish him and his bride-to-be the best of happiness, ever.
Mothers are celebrated in May. Someone missed her mom so very much, she created a day to remember her, and it stuck. And why wouldn’t it? May is a month enveloped in light breezes and pink petals– a girly dream.
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May also remembers dead people. Memorial day, at the end of May, remembers those who make my idle blog-writing possible.
The dead… they made it all possible.
The courageous. The proud.
My grandmother died eight years ago. I remember her and her terrible mixed legacy in my life every May.
I still remember all the details of the day, down to wearing chunky-heeled penny loafers with no socks, and staring down at them minutes before the polite Asian doctor pointed to my grandmother’s CT scan and simply told me that my grandmother’s frontal lobes had been completely squashed like ripe grapes and she had only hours to live.
So much for my thinking that we’d walk out of the hospital laughing over such a trivial matter.
I was going to tell her how she screamed when they restrained her head. She would scream loudly and in Spanish.
I was going to tell her how my step-dad was so worried. And how I was so worried too.
And maybe I’d rib her about the blood and the screams. And about the black vomit. And about the nurses and the paramedics. And about her clothes, ripped away from her body, lying in a neat heap inside a bag. She would have been upset to know that they’d had to do that to get to her veins and give her prompt attention. I think she would have preferred to take them off herself, privately. I think she would have been upset at the waste.
I think she would have wanted to die in some other way. For starters, I am not so sure she would have wanted to die on Wednesday afternoon. Wednesday afternoons are very boring parts of the week and have little élan and panache. They bring to mind grocery lists and bank errands and generally mundane things.
Friday evenings have more glamour. Sunday mornings have that scriptural je-ne-sais-quoi. Monday afternoons have that starchy, blue-collar smell of goodness.
But Wednesday afternoon, right after lunch, it was.
Rest in peace, grandma.
A Daily Dose of Zen Sarcasm! 
That’s so odd. When I got your message on My Space this morning, I was thinking about your grandmother for some reason. I still remember her very fondly. I can’t believe it was really that long ago that I knew her, too.