Shopping for a Box, Thinking about Death

Boxes.  When you need 'em, it's nice to have one.  So many boxes come to our house from our computer business and our Isagenix products that rarely are we at a loss for them.  With family out of state I am constantly sending goodies to others, it is something I love to do really.  

Never having family nearby, I mail a lot of things.  "Brown paper packages tied up with string, these are a few of my favorite things." (Sound of Music)  Now the post office does not like string, only tape.  

So today shopping for a box for a very specific occasion should have been fun but it was more of a necessity.  An ordinary box would not do...

There is death coming to our house next week and it brings to mind deaths I have experienced before. One of the first is the death of my grandmother. I remember my own mother, watching her deal with her emotions about it.  

My mother had never really known her bio mother long.  Her mother died when my mother was 10 y o. She had been nursing mother who was quarantined with scarlet fever for a few months. Her mother and the doctor were the only ones allowed to see her.  On the day the doctor told Maude, (my mother’s mother) that my mother would survive, she collapsed on the floor was taken to a hospital and died of pneumonia. No one talked to my mother about the death. I can only imagine the confusion that was left in a child’s mind with no one to talk to. A 10 y o has no questions or answers about such a traumatic event.   

No antibiotics back then to heal the pneumonia.  So mother grew through the formative teenage years without a mother. Maybe this is why she got married so young, to have a home and children of her own?  Idk.  When asked, my Mother doesn't seem to have a clue why she married so young.

...back to my Grandmother dying, Dad's mom.  This woman was the only mother my own mother might have had if they were close at all. Mother never speaks of Grandmother except to say she was nice. My grandmother sat in silence when she was not in the kitchen cooking for anyone that came in the door.  When she died and Dad was making preparations to bury her, I saw my mother standing in the kitchen of our house as she always did, making Cole slaw and potato salad. I never saw her shed a tear.  She just stood there and peeled the boiled eggs and chopped them in the salad. The thing about my mother is she never cries.  Where she learned this can’t say but seeing her family dynamics across the years, her family was not warm to her or her children.  Outsiders all of us.  I think Mother wanted a different life than the one she grew with but did not know where to find it or how to create it.

Death of anyone or anything is not something we here in USA experience daily.  If I distance myself from the thought, I can make myself believe it hardly happens at all, until it is in my house. 

I fear, I suffer, but only in my mind.  Thank you BK for the reminder.