If you wait for the sunshine, you might wait for a while.

And if you hate these feelings
You can hold onto me until it dies:
And you rise,
May you rise.

I went to Ivy Lawn today, on the way home from school. I thought that I've been dealing with Papa's death in the past year, but I don't really know that I have. Or at least, if I've tried, it obviously hasn't worked. I think my way of dealing with it has been to try and make everyone else feel better about it. When I go to see Ami, and there's a lull in conversation, I can see that she's thinking about him... so I've gotten very good at coming up with something to talk about quickly. I guess one reason for that is that I don't want her being sad... another reason would be that I don't know what to do when she cries. When anyone cries, in fact. It's not that I don't understand them, I think it's that I feel too much empathy. That makes being encouraging sort of difficult. Since Sunday I've been trying to think of what I need to do to confront the things that have been bothering me. I'm still working on that, but when I thought of things that I consider "difficult", I thought of Papa's funeral, and how every day when I drive past the cemetery, my head goes blank and I don't think about anything at all for a few minutes. So today, after class and after I had gone to see Amelia for a while, I drove to Ivy Lawn.

I actually almost turned around at the gate, because it suddenly hit me how much I hate cemeteries - even that famous one in LA, Forest Lawn, which is apparently really cool... my mom and sister like cemeteries because they're quiet and "peaceful". I've never really been able to view death that way, though. Even at Papa's funeral, all I wanted was to get off the cemetery grounds and back into the normal world where there are cars and people and grass that isn't perfectly green. For some reason though, today I parked on the complete opposite end of the cemetery, so I had to walk through all the lawns and headstones. Papa's "grave" isn't really a grave - I don't know what to call it. It's inside the chapel wall. He's 4 up and either 7 or 9 over - I can't remember which. I don't know why he and my grandmother chose to do that - I don't like the fact that he's not underground. It's unnatural. I also don't like the fact that the slab with his name is higher than my head so that I can't reach it. There's a vase attached to each slab of marble, but there's no way to reach that high to put flowers in. It makes me sad that almost every vase had flowers except his. It gives off the impression that he didn't have anyone, which is obviously not true. Speaking of flowers, on the way back to my car I saw a maintenance man going around and taking dead flowers off of headstones and throwing them away. That made me sad, too. I guess it's important to keep the place clean, but really. Those flowers aren't hurting anyone.

When I went into the chapel, I turned the corner slowly because I wasn't sure if someone would be having a service in there; but it was empty. I walked down the side aisle, looking around, and then stopped and looked up - I was standing directly in front of his plaque. It was strange and eerie and cool all at the same time. The one plus about Papa being in the chapel is that I could sit in the pew next to him for a while. I can't actually remember thinking anything in particular this afternoon - other than that it was cold, and I remembered how I had sat next to my grandmother on the pew across the aisle on the day of his funeral. It had been cold that day, too - it was December, after all - and Jesse's mom had given me her black jacket with leopard print inside. Odd the things one remembers.

In all, I was there almost an hour today. I don't know that it really did anything - I've felt a bit out of touch with emotion since Sunday, so it's hard to tell. I think I was half expecting some huge breakthrough to happen, but I guess that was silly. Amelia said that her family used to go and visit her baby sister's grave every year - it was supposedly part of the healing process. She also said that they don't go anymore, because it seems like now it would hurt more than help. Then I started thinking, maybe it's exactly the opposite for me. I needed time to distance myself; but now maybe I ought to start going more often. It makes sense, in a backwards sort of way.

Either way, I want to figure out how to put a yellow rose in Papa's vase.