Day 12: (hibachi and great-grandparents)

I went and ate at some barbecue place with my uncle Gonzalo, and I ate so much meat that I couldn’t eat dinner at the Hibachi grill for my cousin’s birthday. SO much barbecue. That’s Gonzalo above, being an awesome (idiot) guy with some shrimp. What hilarity ensues. Also, I got an actual hiking bag today, and I’m Dinosaur National-bound tomorrow morning. Thanks to my family here in Salt Lake, I’ve had a miniature vacation from the travel. It’s been nice. They are really nice.

Something really sad occurred today. Apparently my great-grandmother of 103 years passed away. It’s sad because there was a time when she came to stay with us in Georgia, and I knew her then. Not well, but I knew her. I never really thought about it too much, and I don’t think that I have yet, that death does not take long to arrive. It’s good to know that she’s no longer suffering (because she was certainly suffering, she hardly knew who anyone was and her skin was like paper). I know that’s something that everyone says, and she may actually not have been suffering, but it’s the best thing that I can come up with.

Death is something that we think about every day and never talk about often. I know that, as I’ve mentioned before, every time I heard sirens I think of death and change. Is death change, then? Is it the passing of an individual from life to eternal sleep? I don’t really know, and I won’t until I die. I’m not a religious man, I don’t believe that there’s a “better place” for people when they die, only that they die when they do and all they can hope for is to have lived a full life. That’s what I intend to do, anyway. I don’t plan on living forever; I know I don’t want to live as long as Thelma (my great-grandmother) did. When I’ve gotten to the point that I can’t function on my own, I think that it’s time for my life to come to a close. I never want to be dependent on other people at such age, reverted to mindless blatherings about possible youth and daipers. Never, I repeat, never will I get to this point. I want to die bye the sea, doing something I love, seeing something I love, or at least being near it, not in a windowed room where people come to check on me in my delirium.

Like I’ve always said, I want to be that old guy with a surfboard that walks the beach during the day with a huge smile on his face and just as many stories to tell as I have wrinkles.