Tonight, driving home from the 'bux, I was thinking about who I am and how people might percieve me. I do now recognize myself as a product of my parents. Not just physically, which is a given (although a bit odd since I'm white and they're both black), but a staggering echo of themselves.

My mother: I have inherited her unfortunate flair for drama, her emotional intuitiveness, depression, alcoholism, singing voice, love of praise, love of love, and kindness.

My father: sense of humor, avoidance of confrontation, slight stubborness when doing things one's self, spiritedness, small temper.

But there are things in ourselves that are our own design - where does this come from? We're not all from the same people who were simultaniously full of every attribute one could have, and then the rest distributed through a luck of the draw genetic card.

I'm far less conservative than my parents, but I can say that's a product of my surroundings. As our generation moves on, I think things will get more liberal. It's just the age we've grown up in and it's what will carry on. I wonder about why I liked to draw so much when I was younger, taking it fairly seriously until high school - and what makes me gravitate towards music? What traits of my grandparents have I receieved? I have my grandfather's eyes and mouth, to so much of a degree that it's uncanny.

I like when people have strong ties to their ancestry. I wish I had more of that.

I just realized that I don't have any grandparents anymore. I haven't cried over my grandma since she died, and it's been bothering me recently - if I think of her, right away I start that tight feeling in the chest, that "oh-god-about-to-start-sobbing" clench, the kind that feels like a thin blanket is being stretched over your heart. Better yet, it's almost exactly like that large apron the dentist puts on you before they take x-ray photos of your molars and bicuspids. It's almost exactly like that.

I need to cry over her - at funerals I feel the need to be strong, honestly for my brother's sake. Then again, he's a lot stronger than I give him credit for. He didn't cry at my grandpa's funeral, although he did at many other occurances . He just didn't want to start crying at the funeral, so he didn't. Now, it may have been easier for him, since our grandfather basically died when he was in the high end of Alzhiemer's. He didn't know who we were, and this happened when Adam (my brother) and I were young.

I have memories of him, but they're hazy and gauzy and I piece together memories of him more through the pictures of us together in old photo albums instead of actual memory; that is, now I have an idea of how it might have been, although no actual memory. I don't like that distance and it makes me jealous of the past. It makes me wish that I had a better memory.

My grandmother was a different story -

jesus, I don't even want to write about it. It's not horrific - I just have, simply, no reason to go down that road.

Is this me avoiding it? This is what I started writing about anyway. OK, fine.

She was very much alive until the day she died, which is a sentence that sounds both stupid and Hallmarky at the same time. She was old - 97, I belive - but she never seemed old. She was to a tee my father's side of the family.

For my cousin's wedding, we flew over to California. At the time, my grandmother was in the hospital for a broken hip, but she was doing so WELL. She denied most pain medication because she didn't really hurt. She was passing in typical Grandma style. She was always so young for her body.

We fly back from the wedding. Then, only a few days later, we get a call that she's not doing so well. We fly back. I stay on the same couch that I did before. The previous week, a union. This one, a departure. I

god

I met her in the hospital and her arms, her small little grandma arms were spotched black and blue from the IVs and needles - the weezing of a respirator machine - she was just so small under those sheets.

The nurses loved her. Her vitality denied her physical state. That next week was like living after a bomb has gone off - the explosion has happened, so it's the silence before things start happening. It happened at 4 in the morning. I heard shuffling and moving around, people getting clothes and shoes. I moved on the couch, rolled to the side - my heart had never beaten faster right from waking up. I knew. They told me. I stayed there. I didn't want to see her dead. I wanted to remember her alive.

That's when I relapsed. I was so anxious that night, so bothered, and I swore one shot of rum would calm me down and I could sleep. Later: half the bottle. That's 3.5 months of sobriety down the drain.

Days later, I was sitting on a small bench in the backyard, and in my journal I wrote her speech about her for the funeral. Typed it up, and we went.

it doesn't matter; their reactions. I'm crying now and so there it is. Sometimes you have to turn around and face what you've missed.