Gravestones

It's the second day of the week back at work, and by Sunday evening I'd resigned myself to it.

This evening I went to a funeral/memorial service in Kreuzberg. It was for the relative whom I'd written about here, who died last spring. It was in a rather lively graveyard: cars and all passing outside the walls, birds, and full of hectic summer elements like tiny beetles that paraded around my finger, wasps, dry leaves and twigs that got caught in hair, butterflies that dove into the papers that someone was just reading from, a minuscule yellow caterpillar that let itself down from a cedar tree, and slightly too balmy heat and light that made one fear a bit for the very elderly amongst us.

It was reassuring to have an opportunity to say goodbye. I've realized after the memorial service for D.S. that it is very hard to have known someone from a distance, to have liked and respected them a lot, and then to just face up to the abstract fact that they've kind of disappeared. To have the chance, instead, to know what they were like through the eyes of their nearest and dearest (I know more about Angi after attending the service, through the texts that people read out), to meet with people whom you know who also knew them, to have it confirmed that the traits of character that you liked about them were not just your imagination but also observed by people who knew them well, to acknowledge one's feelings of loss, and then to have some kind of marker where one needs to move on with life, is a comfort.

I think a consistent sense of pain I feel in connection with Papa is that he was such a good and inspiring figure to me; and it isn't totally clear (at least to an anxious daughter!) how many people apart from my siblings and my mother really saw the same thing, or remember him kindly.