Getting ****ed off helps.

It’s sort of weird, but a lot of people I know or my family knows have died in this past year, but one death I was able to get over very quickly because I was absolutely furious.

My godfather died a few months ago – he was in his 80’s and was preparing for his death for a good 4 years after coming back from a foreign country after contracting pneumonia there three times. So while it wasn’t as sudden a death as others have been, it was still a sad affair.

My godmother managed to erase all sadness in everyone else with her outrageously stupid antics. Like the rest of us, she was perhaps not sad with my godfather’s death as with another person, but she went out of her way to act hysterical. Literally, she howled like a dog with fits of screams, (crocodile) tears, and wails in the hospital ER for the better part of six hours, her theatre punctuated by delusional fits (like asking the nurse to cover my dead grandfather because his feet were getting cold).

It was not real grief. This is some overzealous cultural melodrama that’s popular in my homeland, so it’s 100% fake and everyone knew it except my godmother. Her antics terrified the kids that were waiting in the ward, and upset the other patients who were recovering as well. I suspect one of the men in an adjacent room was recovering from heart surgery, I mean really, do you want to scream about someone dying to someone just struggling to survive? And this went on for six hours.

I only got a small brunt of it – about 30 minutes. But I couldn’t take it either, and I, the nurses, and everyone else was royally ****ed off. It took my mother to push her out of the building, and we couldn’t calm her down even a few days after it. She’d shut up when nobody was listening, but as soon as she saw someone it was back to a baaaaaaaawstrom.

Then at the funeral. I didn’t go there because I was working, but apparently she was behaving there. News outlets were covering the funeral, and everyone made sure to prevent her from going near any camera. But once the news vans left, she erupted into another scene in front of a good 600 people, in public at a cemetery. Cue similar reactions to the hospital ward, although a good number of people were fooled by it.

Any sadness I might have felt was pretty much masked by rage at this embarrbumingly arsinine cultural outburst. Even now, my fingers are still trembling with fury at having to endure it.