I Can't Tell if I'm Impressed or Disturbed

...with the way old people talk about death. Like it's nothing. Like it's a lunch appointment.

My grandma's brother died this week. He was nearly eighty, and he had Alzheimer's, and he had a dog named Princess, and I've only seen him once a year for I don't know how many years so that's literally all I know about him. But he was my grandma's brother.

So I called her. And I dreaded it all day long. I don't know how to talk about death. I don't know what to say to someone who has just lost her brother, one of the few people she has known literally since birth.

No one brought it up for a while. She talked to me about school and how excited I am to graduate. She asked how my husband was doing.

And then she started talking about the funeral. And she was so calm. "You know, Fred's coming up from Tennessee for the funeral, and Pat's coming up from Kansas. I'm trying to figure out how to get them here from the airport, because they're showing him [her brother] Sunday night and then the funeral is on Monday. And you know, it's going to be so chaotic, because you've got the service at the church an then we're all going to Fort Snelling and...." she talked about the transportation and the travel and the traffic and how no one is goin to want to go back to the church for cookies and coffee because everyone will be so tired from the long day and all the travel and there won't be a lunch break.

She seemed more stressed about the traffic than about her brother's death.

And maybe that was just her repressing her emotions. But I work in telemarketing, and every now and then I get a call where someone's brother or sister just died and I gasp and say how terribly sorry I am, and I'm met with, "Oh, well, you know, we're at that age where people die."

Like it's nothing.

And I'm thinking, that is either some A-level zen type of comfort and acceptance of human mortality, or it is a depressing resignation to it. And I can't decide which. Either way it makes me uncomfortable.