Unexpected Consequences of Large Families
My grandma is the youngest of thirteen kids. All but two have lived to be in their 80s or more. As she is the youngest, she is subjected to the dubious honour of watching her parents and siblings pass away before her.
Her sister died Saturday. She is the fourth or fifth to die in the last three years.
My mother keeps my kids for me while I am at work. Normally, this is not a problem, and everything goes smoothly. But when one of my great-aunts or -uncles dies, Mom has to take her mother to the funeral. The family is spread all over the nation, with members in California, Tennessee, Alabama, Florida, North Carolina …
Anyway, so with my great-aunt’s death this weekend, Mom is once again on bereavement duty — which means I have (get to?) take a couple of days off from work to care for the kids.
Thing is, when I tell my employers (great folks, by the way) that there was a death in my family, they think I’m going to the funeral. Which I am honest enough to tell them isn’t quite so. My mom is driving a gazillion miles to the funeral and back, while I spend some awesome quantity-and-quality-time with my kids! This raises eyebrows, but what can they do? It’s either let me take the days off, or put up with two school-age boys hanging about for two days. Which I don’t like to do because it isn’t fair to expect an eight-year-old and a ten-year-old to be that quiet and still for a whole work day. In fact, it’s cruel.
Someone said today that there had been a lot of deaths in my family. I said, well, Grandma is the youngest of thirteen. That’s pretty much gonna guarantee a large number of deaths at some point. I really can’t control when my relatives die, can I?
I can hear it now: “Sorry, great-aunt Sophie. You cannot pass away this weekend because it’s Labour-Day weekend and my boss won’t let me take off the day after a holiday. You’ll have to wait until the second week of September to go.”