Where Did You Come From, Where Did You Go? (Part Two)
I didn’t drop completely until after Granny’s funeral in late October 2021. The family needed me. I was to deliver her eulogy, and help write her obituary. This was important, because Granny was clear on two things regarding her death: 1) we were to go out an buy an old plank of wood to cremate her on, as there was no sense in spending money on anything fancy. And 2) she wanted a good obituary.
Granny would frequently complain about the state of the obituary page in the newspaper.
“This didn’t tell me anything about them,” she would grumble, usually offering a few stories about the person who had passed along, as best as she could remember them.
It was important for her to get to connect with people. It was one of her favourite things to do. Later in life, she stopped introducing herself as “Isabel”, but as “Granny”. Not just a name, but a person in your life who would care for you. She wanted to know more about the people around her, and even in death, wanted to make sure others had the chance to know more about hers.
When I arrived home for the funeral, I started the work. My mom and aunts recalled stories. I bothered all of my cousins for memories. My Papa told us over and over, the story of how he had met Granny while holding green onions at a community baseball game.1 I put all of these stories together for the newspaper, and the funeral. I spoke in front of my family, voice shaking, trying my best to keep it together. I don’t like speaking publicly, but I had to do this. I did okay.
I forced my way through that weekend, and then I stopped.
——
November 2021 was relentless. Danica and I kicked things off by getting sick (not COVID, but something that still packed a punch). This lead right into integrating a new point of sale system2 into our shop - something we had been waiting on for over a year and had scheduled long before life had blown up. That paired with an upgrade to our subscription system that required a seismic change to how we processed our books.
While this all happened, my computer crashed and nearly took everything I had in there with it. There was a flaw in the new operating system that made it think there was enough space on the computer to run. The computer did not have enough space, and was forever stuck in the process of booting up. Some techs managed to fix the problem by moving everything I had on the computer to an external hard drive, but the computer itself had been cleaned out.
The back-up exists untouched. On there are the shells of a few articles that were planned to run in late 2021 and early 2022. The last thing that had been built on there was my Granny’s eulogy. I have avoided digging through that back-up outside of making sure it existed in the first place. I would think about opening it, to get the notes out for articles, but something always stopped me. Over time, I realized I did this because it was a box I was using to contain a thing that hurt me.
This weekend, I plan on remedying this. I want to see where I was, and get an idea of where I thought I was going. I want to connect to an old version of me and I want to push past this block. In the end, it might not work the way I want. This might be another excuse for a lack of general writing professionalism. Either way, I still think the old data needs to be confronted, even just… metaphorically.
After that? More writing. There’s still another part of this personal journey before we get into industry stuff properly. I have a few concepts written down, but before I get to them, there’s some stops through depression, COVID, a fire, and a flood.
Only one of those was a metaphor.
Talk with you all soon,
-B
It’s a wonderful, sweet story where Papa makes a corny joke, and gets the girl. He lights up when he tells it. When Papa was led in during the funeral, he laid a bunch of green onions in front of her urn.
There will ABSOLUTELY be a discussion about BookManager and the great things it can do for a comic shop (along with a few drawbacks).