A Morbid Week With A Sprinkle Of Horror

My grandfather died this week.  It was expected and as far as death and dying go he had a seamless one.  My dad spent every night with him up until the end, even when he went into hospice’s care and he just peacefully went away in his sleep.  I sometimes wish I had been a bit closer to him growing up, but I was one grandchild of what often felt like a billion and I wasn’t that exceptional anyway.  I wasn’t the doctor, or the CEO, or the funniest or the saddest, or first or the last grandchild.  I was and still am very very average.    

Even though it was expected it still hit me harder than I thought that it would.  You go a lot of your life trying to pretend that death will never exist for someone like you and then it hits you that everyone’s end is inevitably the same.  One day you simply will cease to exist altogether and then what?  There are different theories of course.  Humans are bundles of energy and that energy once our bodies have given up on us has to go somewhere, but where that is will always be a mystery for the living. While others, like most of my family believe that you are whisked away to heaven and all of those years of believing will finally pay off in a mansion in the sky. Whatever actually does happen is scary to think about or at least it is for me. I have a hard enough time doing new things by myself and dying is the ultimate one of those things.

Life stops when there’s a death and then there's a domino effect of things that you have to do. There's the visitation, funeral, burial, and family lots and lots of family that will need to be talked to, smiled at, and engaged with.  It’s all so very exhausting, overwhelming and my anxious heart just wants to bury herself into mounds and mounds of pillows in a room somewhere dark and secluded.  But I know I can’t do that; I mean I can, but it’s not very healthy to wallow, so I decided that staying busy was the next best thing.  

I was invited to a concert on Monday night, G was out of town, but the invite still stood for just me, so I went.  Sometimes it’s so tiring being in charge of me, and I really don’t know how I did it for so long, but I decided I would embark on that challenge even though I didn’t know anything about the bands that were playing, but this was a new character opportunity:   metal punk rock girlie.  My friend Kim had box seats, which was a new experience for me and it came with euphoric bougie feelings that I was completely there for.  I got to stare down at the other concert goers, sweaty, standing in each other’s space and I felt like royalty for a moment, so maybe I’m now princess metal punk rock girlie. 

The bands, much to my delight were less metal and more punkish.  The first to take the stage was THE FUNERAL PORTRAIT.  High energy, gender fluid, and entertaining.

Then, DAYSEEKER.  They performed in the dark but still had a ton of energy and I was entertained, and isn’t that the whole point?

The headliner, ICE NINE KILLS reminded me a lot of the Rob Zombie and Alice Cooper concert I went to last year.  Each song was inspired by a horror movie which involved props on stage, as well as actors.  I was there for all of it.  My little geeky theatre heart rejoiced at such attention to character detail.  Also, the band members were really pretty and my imagination went wild with the what ifs.  What if they saw me in the crowd and wanted to meet me?  What if I quite my job and became a roadie or one of the actors that I liked so much on the stage?  How much do they make? I needed to know the answers to these questions because I'm fully ready to make a career change.

This evening was just what I needed.  A little strange, a little morbid, and a little bit of horror can turn anyone’s day around.

The second evening was a bit different, but was what I so desperately needed.  One of the best human beings I know came to town to go with me to the TRAIN concert.

We had previously gone to one music festival years ago and still laugh about it.  We made one of those core memories that changes your brain chemistry for the better.

I've seen TRAIN multiple times and even if you aren’t a huge fan of the band, their concerts are so much fun.  We danced, we sang too loudly, we laughed, we ran in circles trying to find our uber after it was all over and then we lay in bed, laughed some more, and recounted the evening in detail.

Two evenings that couldn’t have been more different, but it helped me to get out of my own head, which is never a fun place to be and is something that I often have to deal with. It gave me what I needed to face the brutal world where dying is a thing, death is a thing, family obligations are a thing and I suspect I will have to create another character to get through it all, so stay tuned for that.