Mourning is a tricky thing.
It's like a wedding ring that you've forgotten is on your finger until you take it off.
Until someone reminds you.
Until it's appropriate to remember.
That's not to say I spend my whole life mourning.
In fact, there have been people that have died around me who I never really met.
That sticky feeling that death is nearby. A fistful of flowers away from your shoulder and yet there's nothing but calm. There's nothing there.
You regard sympathies but you don't cry because there's nothing to cry about.

Let me rephrase this.
I've never learned to process the deceased.
I've watched extensive videos and read books about the way that people would bury their dead throughout centuries. The postmortem effects of a hand twitching. The way you don't always have to embalm. The soft business of being a mortician and the Jekyll-Hyde behavior doctors would adopt in Victorian times in order to attain bodies for science.
I liked death to be clinical.
In high school we dissected a cat for Anatomy class.
It was a little disgusting the grueling way my classmates regarded a stiff cat. The immature manner in which they prodded the skin with no respect and I was left wondering what sociopath would let 16 year-olds with underdeveloped senses of empathy get close to animal cadavers. However, I suppose they did it for people like me.
Every time we reached for that carcass bag filled with mystery fluids I gave a little prayer in my head. I made sure to try my best not to desecrate the body even though it was just a cat.
The sour smell of formaldehyde would sink into your clothing, your hair, your skin.
It would follow me for the rest of the day and I would feel embarrassed sitting next to people during lunch. That year I learned that the skin was also an organ.

I suppose that's one of the reasons I don't keep pets for very long.
Throughout my life I have had an array of pets even though I've lived in small spaces, cramped rooms, storage studio apartments.
It started with baby chicks in kindergarten progressing to a beta fish I found at the dollar store wading in it's own shit and feeling extremely sorry I couldn't buy all of them even though they were only, well, a dollar. I wasn't allowed to go to pet stores and my parents very much avoided them.
It then progressed to a bunny with floppy ears and at the age of 11 I thought that it was depressed and that's why it's ears swooped downwards not because it was a special type of breed who ears were always like that. It eventually ran away one day at the park.
It was only until recently that I managed to keep a parakeet for some time. It was small and sickly but I loved it all the same but animals like those require a kind of treatment that affection cannot cure. The morning afterwards it had fallen from it's perch and I felt very disorganized.
When I reached for it the body was hard like it had been stuffed tightly with cotton.
I half expected a jump scare where it would resuscitate back to life in my hands and peck me in the eyes. But it just lay there with it's pitch dark eyes staring back in empty decay.
This year my rat of two years died for Thanksgiving and it came as a shock but it also came as a relief. She was getting old as the life expectancy of rats are only two years maximum and I knew there was suffering from the tumor she had on the underside of her arm.
It was painful to come Friday morning and see her so still. No greeting. No movement. Just a sharp kind of silence. The kinds you find yourself in with people who are angry at you.
Her body was a lot heavier. It didn't feel like the parakeet, lightweight but firm. It felt like a swollen rock. Too burdensome for it's own body to contain. My hands trembled.

But humans are different.
It feels like your own mortality is at the door ready to turn the light off when you've kept it on every night for 21 years.
I guess this says more about the living than it does about the dead.
I'm not religious and I'm not arrogant enough to know what happens after our souls leave this world.
I imagine it feels a lot like how white noise sounds but I can't say for sure.
When it happens it's not clinical. It's not the way you see in those daytime television soap operas.
All those specific details you learned in order to feel comfortable about something so raw disappears.
I don't think I can even accurately describe it in words and encompass all the thoughts that pass through your head when it happens and I'm sorry because my forte are words and even those fail me at times like these.
The holidays are a grim time to die and yet the departed waits for no one. It makes sense to go along with the wilting grass and the white-bone trees. There's a feeling of harmony to coexist with the graciousness of another season falling into another.
My grandmother whom I only recognize from pictures and home videos exists solely in my memories through the stories my mother would tell me and I wish I knew more than a stern look in a black and white photograph and discreet movements on VHS but I'll miss her all the same. It'll be in the way that my mother will be quieter at Christmas events from now on. It'll be in the way that certain things will be avoided and certain topics will be too tender to enunciate.
I don't know how to conclude this so I will stop here.

sincerely,
your absurdist narrator