20190302.0430

Today is Texas Independence Day, something I note even if I am, once again, not in the state to celebrate it. It is not the first time I have marked the occasion in this webspace--that would be here--and certainly not the first time I have marked the occasion overall. But as I looked back over the records I've left in this webspace to see what I have said of the occasion before, I came across something else I've commemorated here: the death of my maternal grandmother. Seeing it, my attention has been compelled by it, and I have thought upon that compulsion and what it calls forward from me.
I have to resist a tendency toward the maudlin as I write; it is something of a struggle for me at the best of times, and having the reminder of a death prompts many people towards it. But wallowing in that tendency and its results will do me no good, and I know it. And it has been four years since the death, now; such wounds as it left have closed by now, and, to borrow from one of my favorite authors, scars are not as good as the flesh they replace, but they stop the bleeding. So I should not allow myself to fall into the trap of cliché lamentation; the death is worth noting, worth considering, worth remembering sadly, and worth more than the hackneyed protestations that often accompany such things out of their exceeding words.
If the loss of the unifying figure who was my grandmother can be said to mark a major point of divergence for my family--and it can, for many reasons--then it behooves those of us who remain and remember to look back and see the ways things in the family have changed since the death. Such reflection is something that writing does well to facilitate; it is far easier to read the words written then and consider them against the words that are written now than to remember what was in the mind then and make the similar comparison. Indeed, it can be argued that the latter cannot be done, not truly, even as it is argued, truly, that both the recollection and the reading reflect only limited, parsed, curated, selected, partial truths of the moments concerned. Yet at least in the writing there might be some consistency of writerly persona, some focus and cohesion and comprehensibility imposed by enacting such a role that might help make sense of things that generally admit of little if any sense at all.
Then again, I would say such things, sitting with a doctorate in a humanities field as I do. I would be expected to rely on written words for meaning. But if I do, it is in large part because I was taught to do so--not only by my schooling, but before it, looking at the elder members of my family reading throughout the day and finding joy in it. And my late grandmother was one of the chief among them.