Shouldering the Mantles Left Behind

I hadn't realized that it had been months since I last posted.  So this is long overdue.  These past few months have been good, overall; with a few splashes of not so good thrown into the mix.  I've been focusing moreso on crochet and knitting, on a daily basis, so finishing up some projects, starting some, etc.  There will probably be a separate post about that, with pictures of current stages and all.

This post is a bit more somber.

Last fall, with the death of my mother's brother, the last of my maternal grandmother's children died.  It made me think about the passage of time, how generations of young become generations of aged, and how eventually we all go thru the dying and death process and yet, most of us are so ill prepared in this society to even think about end of life, dying, death, and grief.  Those remain taboo subjects of a sort, with intense associations and responses.

Many near and dear friends in my generation are looking at these issues with some depth, for the first time, with a parent's passing.  In my family, we are shifting our views from the elderly to the younger generation that is now becoming the elderly, the oldest of this generation are now the oldest in the family, period.

My husband, who is in many ways, in the generation that is a tad bit older than me, is now the oldest in our family.  His father died in 1991, his mother died in 2015.  His mother was an only child, tho his father had siblings, the last of whom, we will bury today.

At age sixty, my husband became an orphan.  It's not an easy concept to grasp at any age, being without a parent, let alone two of them.  At 61, he's now the eldest in the family, even extended family.  We don't have a well defined position with meaningful importance in our society for this person, tho most of us intuitively understand that that person holds untold amounts of knowledge, that that person often holds the keys to history in a way that we cannot fully grasp at that time.

Today, my husband's first mother in law, his children's grandmother, died.  She was 82, leaving a son, his son, and other grandchilden as well.  Calls were made, trips are planned, adult children and adult grandchildren are returning to home, to pay their respect, to say their goodbyes, to take on the mantles that are now left behind.