Working It Out Weekend Recap

How do all?  I hope you had a wonderful weekend full of relaxation, productivity balanced with some tomfoolery.  I'd say we did but a little light on the tomfoolery which is disappointing.

Saturday we went to the grave of a co-worker I used to occasionally have lunch with that died during the pandemic at the end of August.  I wasn't able to go to her viewing but was glad the cemetery had a lookup feature so I could find her.  I know the headstones take a few months but hers still wasn't there which shocked us both almost 10 months later!  I assume I was in the right place since her in-laws of the same last name were buried next to the grown over grave in the area they showed her located.  The Mr and I, before visiting, said that we would never leave the other's grave unmarked and get temporary markers.  I don't understand why cemeteries don't do that.  If it's distressing for someone not closely related, I can't imagine how the families feel.  It just feels like they're forgotten.

Then on Friday the Mr found the information from the cemetery where my dad's dad was buried since a search of graves from the time he died turned up nothing due to no stones again from December.  We were a section off and turns out they bought the plot years ago.  (Still don't have his death date on there yet.  That was 6 months ago.  I get turning out a stone taking time but you can't get some engraver dude out there??)  A reminder, this is the grandfather who basically disowned me after dad left for whatever reason.  He thought it was a 9 year old's responsibility to keep up the relationship with a whole side of the family who deserted her.  The last two times I saw him, particularly the last time I saw him (which were years apart), he made it clear he didn't really care that I came over to the point that when we left the Mr apologized for him he was so appalled.  When he died (after no one told me) I had a LOT of feelings that came up from 30+ years of rejection by him in addition to the attitude he passed on to my dad and all of the feelings that came with that.  When I tried to find him in January (because I figured how many new piles of dirt could there be?) I wanted to unleash all of my anger on him.  I felt like finally telling him what he did to his son and in turn, me and how it screwed up so much in my life would potentially bring on some kind of healing.  Now that I was standing in front of the grave with his name on it, I was ready to let'r rip.  I stared at it or more accurately the flowers someone had planted there for a minute, looked at the Mr and said "that's that" and walked away.  I felt nothing.  I thought maybe seeing his name etched in stone, which is the same name as my dad, would make me gasp to see that finality.  Nope.  I felt for him basically what he felt for me my whole life...nothing.  I wasn't going to stand there and fake mourn him or shed a crocodile tear for a man that made me feel like a walking piece of crap my entire life.  He believed in demanding respect, not earning it and he passed that pompous attitude onto my dad who almost passed it on to me but thankfully that's not how I ever thought.  I know where he is and when we walk that cemetery, I don't plan to pass by there again until my grandma is gone.  I do have good memories of her when I was little even if she was fully complicit and enabling in their side of the family's abandonment and then playing the victim.  But to visit him specifically?  Not happening.  

In other news, I found out that the thief and her accomplice that my good grandma's jerk husband let move in and trash all of my grandma's things have a warrant out for their arrest.  Before anyone clutches their pearls over me calling him a jerk, he had everyone from family (whom he immediately cut ties with) to his financial advisors and doctors to the police telling him to cut ties with this woman.  He has cut off his previous family before he met my grandma 45 years ago so I was not surprised he had it in him to act so cruel and verbally abusive.  He cost my grandma a relationship with her closest sister due to his inability to see another person's point of view and unleashed a tirade they could never recover from until it was basically too late after grandma had been diagnosed.  He was declared of sound mind during all of this so there was nothing the one family member who went back for his continued abuse could do.  It wasn't until he became ill and hospitalized several times that the doc was like "I think maybe we could have him declared unfit now" and guardianship was issued to that family member and taken away from the thief.  (That's right, he'd given that woman guardianship!!)  They worked on getting her evicted from grandma's home and I guess discovered that 95% of the belongings had been destroyed and the place trashed.  In the end, $115,000 was stolen from him in money and goods.  The money he freely GAVE her in hopes she'd eventually have sex with him.  I'm not holding back because you all need to know this CAN happen to you.  Problem is, this family member is publicly attaching themselves to efforts to get them arrested and these people are drug dealers and have guns.  You don't think someone who is desperate isn't going to come after you when they stole his car and got pulled over with drugs and guns in the trunk?  Keeping my nose out of all of it.  I'm just SOOOO glad I took the stuff of Grandma's that I did in the beginning with no one's permission (even though I told my mom about it after I did and she said it was stuff we'd always talked about me having).  If I had waited for this big "family can come take her stuff when I'm ready to let it go" event he promised when she died, we would've gotten nothing to remember her by.  The stuff I took is stuff he never missed and I feel like Grandma enabled that opportunity for us to be alone in the house to get the mail for her one last time while he was away so we could do it.  I am grateful for that.

Needless to say, the weekend wasn't super relaxing on the emotional front!  LOL  I did finally get to finish our 25th anniversary book by adding the pics from our anniversary on the blank pages I left at the end so that was nice to see it completed.  We got in some tube time that was about it.

Riveting.

How was your weekend?

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