Timelies all!

They have altered the schedule at work again to only have two people per day in the lab. Which means I'm only going in to work two days next week. Still supposed to work from home, however much I can accomplish with Mr. S around.

Matilda is wearing her black Doc Martens because her Papou gave them to her.

Oh, this hit me in the feels

I hope you have gray or any dark pants, Hec, but if not no one will care

I discovered that Postmates will deliver Walgreens and ordered a bunch of stuff. Got 4 things out of probably a dozen ordered, but those were oatmeal, Diet Coke, and 2 types of chocolate so I feel like I did pretty well! Been spending my work-holiday (every year it seems weird to me to get Good Friday off, this year more so, but I will take it!) watching One Dsy at a Time and making a dent in my dishwashing backlog.

It's way too quiet in here

It's way too quiet in here

We're back from the funeral. This grief business is very exhausting.

On the one hand, it was a lovely ceremony in a beautiful cathedral, and it was sunny and bright when he was buried.

On the other hand, it was weird and strange that everybody had to stand far apart, no hugging or hand shaking, and only a meager handful of family and closest friends allowed to attend so they could be properly distanced.

Also, because he created a seamless trust, when JZ's dad died, she and her brothers now own his (quite big) business. Which is why we drove the company car home.

This is the Greek Orthodox Cathedral of the Ascension: [link]

While we were there JZ noted that she and her brothers had been baptized at the baptismal font there. And her parents were married there.

This is the cemetery: [link]

{{{all y'all}}} and adjustment~ma for on top of the grieving

I am relieved to not be posting into a void!

Wow, that's gorgeous! I like to hear about that kind of continuity. My uncle's funeral was at a church that he helped to build (as a child so who knows how much he actually did, but still) and that was a comforting detail

{{{JZ and family}}} How's Matilda doing?

How's Matilda doing?

She's okay. She sobbed when she threw a rose down into this grave, but has mostly been concerned with comforting Jacqueline.

As soon as JZ breaks down into sobs, Matilda comes padding in from her room (with what can only be described as a capering trot) and gloms into an immediate group hug.

Awww, she's a sweetie.

We just got back about an hour ago and have begun, at last, to decompress.

Just before heading out to the service, I was reading about panicked, desperate coroners and funeral directors in NYC, and about the hundreds of thousands of families in China facing this week designated by millennia-old tradition to tend to the graves of one's ancestors and honor their memory, and how lost these families are with not only no graves but no bodies, no ashes and no likelihood of ever knowing where exactly their beloveds have gone. All our mourning rituals that make sense of death and grief and help us to heal have been upended. And in a weird way my family and others in the Bay Area are bitterly privileged because at least we can have funerals and burials--even with all these horrible, surreal restrictions, we have more space for the rituals of sorrow than so many others.

But still. 13 people (there were going to be 14, but one--who is facing an entirely different catastrophic illness--didn't show, and even at 13 we had to spread out extra far so the county health dept. couldn't watch the livestream of the service and catch us going over the 10 person limit), 10+ feet apart, all with complicated relationships with my father and each of us gasping and crying at different moments, with everyone else unable to do anything but look and try to send psychic hugs with the power of our minds because the one thing we all wanted to do most, clutch and embrace and cry together, was the one thing we couldn't do.

We were weirdly blessed in various ways--the Orthodox priest who'd baptized both my younger brothers, who is undergoing cancer treatments himself, came to be part of this because he felt he couldn't not. (Random facts: (1) Our mom is one of his favorite humans on the planet and every time he sees her he asks her when she's going to convert and every time he sees me--except today--he wraps me in a hug and tells me to pass it along to my mom; (2) He is George Stephanopoulos's godfather, because the Orthodox community in the US is just exactly that small; (3) Despite all that, his homily was kind of rote and sentimental and cringey, and everyone in the family preferred the homily by the other priest, whose homily during our uncle's funeral a month and a half earlier we'd all loathed. Something has changed him profoundly in the last 6 weeks, and we all felt it to our bones--very likely the terrible fact that his sister just died on Wednesday, in Minneapolis, and he cannot be there for her burial and is broken open by that loss in a way he couldn't have imagined six weeks earlier.) And the choir mistress, a second-generation liturgical music specialist who does this for a living and usually charges heavily for her services, volunteered her vocal gifts today out of love for our father.

It was oddly comforting to have Hec there--this church is one of the two our parents were married in, the one both brothers and I were baptized in, the place where I first experienced any sense of numinous wonder. I don't think I will ever, EVER return to the Orthodox faith, but something of it is in my bones, and this particular church was designed with more care and love and attention to creating a space in which to be meditative and attentive than any other I've ever been in. He'd never before been to any service there; sharing this grief in this specific space, with all its personal weight, with him felt as intimate as anything we've experienced in the course of our marriage.

The interior of the church is domed, covered in copper panels, with a gigantic painted icon the adult Christ in the center at the apex of the arc and painted icons of the twelve Apostles in a circle around him. In a second arc, connecting that circle of Apostles with the altar and the floor on which the rest of us sit and stand, is a twice-life-sized icon of Mary and the Babe, looking out serenely upon the congregation. In the Greek church she is called the Theotokos, the God-bearer, the human bridge between eternity and mortality. Just to the (continued...)