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Part 2

Well... here I go again, talking about death)))

My favorite topic. Or maybe not favorite. Just one that keeps finding me no matter how successfully I try to avoid it.

For most of my life, I did exactly that. I avoided funerals. I found reasons not to go. Ever since my first experience at thirteen, when my grandmother died, the whole ritual around death filled me with anxiety. Not even death itself, but the process. The people. The grief. The expectation that you should somehow participate in all of it.

It's one thing when you can skip the funeral of a distant relative you've seen once in your life, somewhere between learning how to walk and learning how to read. It's a completely different thing when it happens to someone close. Then the internal permission to stay away somehow disappears.

Over the years there were more deaths. Grandparents. Relatives. People I wasn't particularly close to. Even when I was dragged there, I mostly stood somewhere in the background waiting for it to end. Which is funny because when I was little and spent summers at my grandmother's village, funerals were honestly one of my favorite social events))) There were candies. There was food. There were usually my favorite crepes or poppy seed buns. There were lots of adults having conversations I wasn't supposed to listen to but absolutely did. The only downside was that for some reason nobody appreciated my desire to run around and dance. Very unreasonable behavior from them, honestly)))

The second time death truly confronted me was much later, after my ex-boyfriend passed away. And that was probably the first time I consciously allowed myself to look death directly in the face. To stay. To witness it. To feel everything that came with it. And honestly, I never regretted going. To call it a transformative experience would be an understatement.

And you know what's strange?

The older I get and the more death becomes part of life, the more dark humor starts appearing inside me. Which brings me to my grandfather. The last elder of our family died two weeks ago. My mother's father. He was 93 years old. He lived a long, full, complicated life. And because of that, I didn't think I would feel much grief about his death itself. It felt like the natural conclusion of a very long story.

I thought there would be memories. Some nostalgia. Maybe a quiet sadness. But no real heartbreak. I was wrong. There were tears. There was grief. And there was an absolutely inappropriate amount of dark humor pouring out of my mouth that made me slightly ashamed of myself))) It's fascinating how the mind chooses its defense mechanisms.

My favorite joke during those days was:

"Well... I finally got to introduce Gary to my grandfather.")))

Not exactly the introduction I had imagined.

And then something happened that surprised me even more. For the first time in my life, I found myself deeply romanticizing death. I was looking at my grandfather lying in his coffin, dressed in his favorite suit, surrounded by flowers. And I couldn't stop looking. Not at him exactly. At the whole scene. At the composition of it. The flowers. The textures. The stillness. The strange beauty of it. It completely captivated me.

When I was younger, I could barely glance at a dead body. I would avoid looking. Avoid standing too close. Avoid thinking about it.

This time I couldn't look away. Part of me even wanted to photograph it exactly as it was. Not him...not my grandfather - his body, flowers, image itself. The strange collision of beauty, ritual and mortality. Of course, I didn't do it) But the desire itself surprised me.

And maybe that's what death has slowly become for me. Less terrifying. Less forbidden. Less something to run away from. Not beautiful. But no longer something I feel the need to look away from.