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Jim's grandmother died a few weeks ago. She was ONE HUNDRED EIGHT AND A HALF YEARS OLD.

How does anyone born at the tail end of the 20th century make a lifespan like that make any sense at all?

I'm 41 - when Rita (not her real name) was my age, Bill Haley and the Comets recorded and released their hit single Rock Around the Clock.

Additional context about what it means to leave the party at 108 in 2022 - she was literally just here - Rita was:

• Born the year before WWI started
• 4 years old when the Spanish flu pandemic started
• Not quite 6 when white American women won the right to vote
• 4 days shy of her 32nd birthday when WWII ended
• 50 when JFK was shot
• 67 the year Ronald Reagan was elected
• 88 on 9/11
• 94 when the iPhone debuted
• 106 when Covid-19 was declared a global pandemic

Her grandchildren are retirees!

Late checkout

The funeral felt like an outlier from other sendoffs I've attended - it was the least-somber funeral service I've ever been to, and it's not even close.

It was more like a wedding?

Sure, some folks cried during her Catholic Requiem Mass, but people get emotional at weddings too.

The long lead time allowed the funeral to kind of be her Big Day. She got an impressively robust turnout from her guest list, too. Nice!

The young-ish priest clearly knew her pretty intimately from many years' worth of visits to the assisted-living spot she lived in.

During the homily - which is an interpretative expansion the priest talks through after he reads a passage from the Gospel - he gave a best-man speech about who Rita was and the stories she told him about what she was into: Mary Cassatt paintings and other fine art, travel to Western Europe, herb gardening, and her immense family that cascaded down to great-great grandchildren.

Another piece of intel he dropped was that the funeral pall (a white sheet of cloth covering the casket with a crucifix on it) intentionally looks a LOT like baptismal garments Catholics dress babies and new converts in - the pall brings the believer full-circle, from the new life celebrated by baptism to the new life a believer experiences through physical death.

White clothing is heavily leveraged in most rites of passage in Catholicism - baptisms, coming of age rituals (first holy communion and confirmation), weddings, and funerals.

One more cool thing Rita's son mentioned in the eulogy was that Rita's mother used to sing When Irish Eyes Are Smiling to her when she was very small, so the organist and cantor did that song as mourners filed out at the end. That detail felt a little like an 1910s parallel of a modern parent slow-dancing with their newlywed adult child to God Only Knows.

The lunch afterwards with the big extended family felt like a wedding reception, too. We packed a large white room trimmed with dark wood at a tavern local to her church and ordered from a fixed menu of beef, chicken, and vegetarian options; sat with dressed-up relatives we don't see often; and caught up, laughing and sharing stories, over fountain Cokes and tiny white cups of coffee.

One-sided Q&A with the recently departed

How the hell do you keep going through such an extended overload of devastating human events - and continue to find meaning in any of this?

At some point you have to kinda stop paying attention to absolutely fucking bonkerballs global disasters and tragedies if you have tons of kids to care for and can't afford to go insane. Just...in which decade?

Have activist/victim conditions around racism gotten better in any material way since the sit-ins and the Black Panthers? Are these problems worse today, just in different flavors? Would a 108-year-old white person even know?

What could a centenarian with 8 and a half years of extra credit possibly think of all this as they log off with the world being in the state it is in 2022? What could they believe about the future descending on their descendants?

I mean, she showed up right before a world war and global pandemic and left while the same old bullshit was starting up again - only now, the instigators are a generation younger than her instead of older.

Has all the positive social progress she's seen just been nullified in the most recent eras - like, were the forward leaps and subsequent regressions of society in her lifetime a complete wash? Is this a repeating delusion that things could be better that only someone her age could recognize over such a long lifetime?

What's the ideal time to roll credits?

Everyone at the funeral seemed to be at peace with the age at which Rita took her leave. 108 is an extraordinary age to live to. I wouldn't think there would be too many new things a very elderly person would be inclined to investigate at that stage: all options for novelty have been smoked.

Of course her family loved her, but they seemed in agreement that she didn't owe the world anything more. It was time.

But when Betty White passed away this past New Year's Eve, I was impressed that folks expressed 99.96 years (just 8 ticks younger than Rita) was far too young to die for someone they loved so dearly. Aww!

So if 99.96 is too young to let go, and 108 is like, wow, what a relief for her - by the law of averages, is around 104 the Goldilocks age to die?

Funerals for the living

My maternal grandparents were married for over 65 years. On their 60th anniversary in the early 2010s, I went to visit and congratulate them on such an extraordinary relationship achievement.

They sat on opposite ends of their floral couch and both looked at the floor silently, mouths set in a straight line of disapproval, and shook their heads in slow unison.

My maternal grandparents clearly regretted not divorcing before it was - arbitrarily - too late. (More of my thoughts on regret live here.)

Five years later, their 65th anniversary party was engineered by their children to be a kind of living funeral - a gathering together of all the extended family and friends that were left to say some words of appreciation about their united legacy while the two married people were both still around to hear them.

That party was slightly more chipper than my solo visit to them on their 60th - but it still felt quite a bit more like a conventional funeral than Rita's big day.

RSVPing with the filet option checked, vigorously

If I have any say in it - which provided you're a reasonably proactive person, you always do - I'd much rather have a funeral that's a wedding than a wedding anniversary that's a funeral.

It doesn't matter so much how many years old I am when I split - but it would be totally rad if people I loved were of the opinion that my dismount was right on time, like Rita's, and they got their fill of QT with KLA.

I DO hope folks to adjourn from the reception saying that I left it all on the field as far as running hard with every opportunity I got and being a great friend to all of them as individuals.

Ideally, my 3-foot plastic-turtle sandbox in the fathomless desert planet of modern human events was left slightly improved from how I found it.

In my fun little fantasy, my friends will shake their head, roll their eyes, and smile - like "that son of a bitch was kinda bananas, but wow, did she do some cool shit - and I'm way better off having run into her."

Not a wet eye in the house! That's the dream!

If I finish up before you, please definitely feel empowered to break out a garishly huge Termini Bros wedding cake on my big day and tell the church organist to bump She Bangs to get this motherfucker started.

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Albums and songs I spun while I wrote this

• Love Kills Joy: My Old Street (last week)
• Love Kills Joy: We Were Surrounded (2021)
• Love Kills Joy: Self Help (2020)
• Original Son: Currents (2022)
• Neckscars: Don't Panic (2021)

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