It's been a little too hard to write this week. I think you can all guess what happened. Everyone but Tony was able to come. Larry and John had just gotten back to Raliegh and had to turn right around.

All us grandkids wrote a second eulogy. Someone decided it would be good for me to read it, but I said I couldn't. Luke volunteered, but once he got up there he just couldn't read it. Seth saved us all.

Bunny and Ruthie were both inconsolable. Not that I didn't try, but it's just terrible to see old ladies crying. I saw the Johnsons, I really like both of them.

I just felt lousy leaving the cemetary at Bourne and driving right back to my Mom's. I know Grandma'd be yelling at me for even coming, with all the things I have to do. More on that later.

Today has possibly been the worst day of my life, but I'm actually surprised at how phlegmatic I'm feeling about it. I guess I'll recount it in chronological order, the worst part comes last anyway.

9:00 AM: I discover that since the rent checks arrived late while Jamie and I were travelling, the new land-lady has begun court action against me instead of, oh, say, informing me that there was a problem a week ago when she called me on the phone. I have until noon, I'm told to pay the full amount plus penalty or she's going to dissect me and eat me alive. Oh yeah, and evict me.

After waiting for her to get off the phone with some other poor victim, I set out to the ATM, it's just across the street. No problem, I'll deposit a check from the charter school and get the cash out. Never having attempted to withdraw this much cash from a machine, I discover that it's verboten.

9:30: I head to the bank, nothing remarkable happens, I get the cash, and return to the rental office.

10:10: The Hydra informs me that she cannot accept cash, it's against company policy. I read her the portion of one of the bills that states "This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private." The Hydra is not amused. Back in the car to get a postal money order.

10:35: With money order in hand, I return triumphant. I also make her fill out the money order, just from spite.

Rent cost: 653.30 Money order: 1.25 Total dollars spent: 654.55

10:40: Having not eaten anything yet, I decamp to the farmers' market. It's a little dead, but I secure lovely peaches, tomatoes, zucchini, silver queen corn, wax beans, peppers (two for a dollar!), and a cantaloupe.

Veg: 13.50 Total dollars spent: 668.05

11:30: I'm hungry, so I eat breakfast at the Farmer's Market Restaurant. Scrambled eggs, hash browns, biscuit, and bacon make for a good breakfast. Balancing this with the earlier morning, I could still call this a good day.

Chow: 4.35 Tip: 1.00 Total dollars spent: 673.40

12:00: Return home. Make tomato salad, carefully wrap peaches in paper towels for transport to class, search frantically for notebook.

12:30: Depart for class, driving right past the bank again. Arrive to class late, but not as late as the professor, so it never happened...

1:00: Discover that for some reason, I've been dropped from my class. Now the class is full. The professor is perfectly generous and lets me in on an override, but I can't participate in the online tutorial. Sob.

Tuition: 1930.72 Late Fee: 50.00 Total Dollars spent: 2654.12

3:36: While I'm re-enrolling in my class, I get a visit from the parking cops.

Ticket: 25.00 Total Dollars spent: 2679.12

4:25 Home again. Time to pay more bills. Student loans, health insurance (inexplicably $50 higher than last month!), cable/internet.

Student Loans: 279.00 Insurance: 423.64 Cable/Internet: 95.85 (shame)
Total Dollars spent: 3477.61

I'm pretty sure I didn't spend anything else today.

So I get down to homework. Since this class is only 3 weeks long, I've got about a week's worth every night. For dinner, I decide on chicken nuggets, mac and cheese, and wax beans not realizing that I've got no milk. Or at least no milk that anyone would consume without being tortured first. So I improvise with butter. Just a note, butter alone does not make satisfactory mac and cheese, even Annie's.

At 8:00, my dad calls. Never a good sign these days. He said that my Grandmother's other foot has become gangrenous and that she was back in the hospital. They wanted to amputate it, too, but she has decided to refuse all medical care except pain medication. In short, she's had enough. Being so frail, she'll probably die within the week.

It's not easy to say these kinds of things. I'm trying really hard not to be hypocritical or a jerk and get upset over her decision. It sounds horrific, but I really wish she would have stepped out in front of a bus two or three years ago, before all the strokes, the broken hip and hip replacement, broken leg, cracked pelvis, neuralgia pain, diabetes complications, vein grafts to the feet, foot amputation, and the steady, humiliating loss of her mental acuity. All she ever wanted was quality, not quantity.

My Dad says not to throw my life into disarray to come visit her for one last time. I was there less than two weeks ago, he reminds me. He's probably right, we had what passes for a nice visit, especially in light of all this. We were glad to see one another. Besides, with all the painkillers, she's not really in touch with the world. I hope.

Having written here yesterday, I think this was all easier to take. I know it sounds flaky, but I knew that something was going on with her. I just hope she knows that I love her as much as I do, and that while we all wish it weren't so, we understand that she can't go on like this.

Grandma, we grieve, but it's really for ourselves, our loss and lonliness. We're happy to know that you're happy too. I love you.

In the words of Bender: "I just made myself sad." Thinking about my Grandmother, I realized I've accepted the fact that she'll probably die within a few months. I've known for a while, but just obstructed the thought before it could emerge.

In an email, my aunt Jame mentioned that my uncles John and Larry had gone up to Massachusetts together. That makes four of the five brothers in one place. I didn't have the heart to ask if Eddie was there or not. In the past 15 years, they've only been together twice: a wedding and a funeral.

I know they're deciding what to do with her, what can be done. After her amputation in March, she gave up. She's not even fighting with my dad anymore. The last time I was there, in June, she was asking questions about her newest grandson and admiring my knitting. Now she's hallucinating on the painkillers again, when she's not refusing physical therapy.

I feel sick every time I have to go into one of those places and be cheerful, try to rouse her out of her addled stupor. I resent whoever's fault this is, fully knowing that it's just as much everyone's as no-one's. I sent her letters I'm not even sure she's read, urging, pleading with her to be well. I fed her potato salad, she liked it, but she couldn't remember that she wasn't lifting the spoon herself, holding her napkin like a sandwich and biting it each time she wanted more. She forgot how much she had eaten and made herself sick. I cry all the time, usually uncontrollably, but I just couldn'tlet anyone know.

This is even worse because of who she's always been. A Captain in the Army, thrify, tough, loving, a caretaker, an RN, now she can't even get out of bed. She loved to garden, travel, visit relatives, parks, zoos, museums. She loved to read, hurtling through biographies of early US Presidents, several magazines, and the Boston Globe every day. We used to sit at the dining room table and talk about all the news, or in the kitchen and talk about food. I was able to turn to her in her experience about everything from making the spaghetti sauce come out right to comprehending September 11th (she volunteered after Pearl Harbor) to dealing with the sudden, strange death of my other grandmother.

I'm alternately despondent and enraged. She doesn't deserve to be taken piece by piece, her foot, her mind, her independence, her pride. It's cruel that Elizabeth and Mitchell will never get to know her, that the house we all love is falling apart, that the strain is driving my father and uncle Dave to despise one another. Who can I blame? There's that nebulous group, the comfortably anonymous "doctors," or everyone's enemy "the home," but the anger just falls empty when I raise it. I know that any rage I might have toward God, causality, or the universe can't be resolved even by expressing it, so I've got no help there. I could turn on my father or uncles, or even my Grandmother herself, but I know that's not going to get me what I want: my family back. I don't even get relief from this, yelling into the abyss where I'm sure no-one's listening.

I'm going to bed. Maybe I'll sleep.

Now I'm really feeling the stress. Tomorrow, er, today, I start my Latin Prose Comp class. I'm a little nervous, but what really upsets me is that I now have to face my fate. I can't put off the hardest studying anymore. I've been sleeping really badly for the past few nights. I finally start feeling tired around 2:30 but I've been hearing the clock ring at 3 way too many times. I'm usually up again around 6, with another struggle to fall back asleep. I've got too much to think about, worry about. It's especially hard to read and study, I keep getting distracted.

My financial situation is a bit amiss. The rent checks were late arriving, so are the health insurance and student loans. I'll have to call tomorrow and see if I can undo some of the damage. Ugh. At least my paychecks from the charter school are still coming. Thank God for 12-month pay. Jamie has been a prince. He rented a truck to move me back without putting me through the humiliation of admitting I can't afford it.

There's so much more I don't even want to think about right now, including the fact that I didn't study at all today. It seems that tomorrow will be a new day, but you never know.

I'm not sure what to say about this London bombing business, but I feel compelled to express something. I was in the UK with my family when three little boys were killed by a firebomb thrown during some sort of protest. I remember how the train stations locked down, there weren't even any trash cans left out because they could conceal a bomb. Two years ago, when my boyfriend and I were on vacation, we stayed at a hotel right next to where the bus bomb went off today. I think our room overlooked it.

I'm not sure why everyone feels compelled to lay out their connections to this kind of violence. Everyone had a September 11th story, or knew someone who was there. In a way, it's ghoulish to want to be connected with this kind of event, but I don't think that's the motivation of even a small minority of people. I believe that it's a reflection on our own mortality. Each of us pictures ourselves in such a situation. What if I had been there? Would I have been injured? Killed? I think everyone worries that we'd be the unfortunate ones.

I want to express my great love and sympathy for the victims, the families, and indeed all the British people. Three years ago, when I was a student in Italy, I recieved nothing but love and support from people expressing their feelings about the September 11th attacks. It was such a comfort to feel the solidarity of the world against that horror. I want to do what I can to extend this sentiment to the British people now. We love you and we are with you.

My friends and I have revived family dinner night. Some are in the same boat as me, others have been forced back into their college jobs after some sort of employment debacle so no one has any money. We all get together to eat spaghetti or lasagna, or something else equally economical, watch tv, and commune. Even though it represents our assorted failures, it's nice to have everyone in the same place again. Now we can watch the Red Sox and hope that two miracles in one lifetime isn't too much to ask.

I'm not even sure that this is a very good idea, but seeing that I'm just as mouthy and opinionated as anyone, I may as well get on with it.

It's been a strange few months for me. After a truly tedious series of interviews, phone conversations, and school visits, I haven't found a job that wouldn't be a daily misery. I suppose it's my own fault, being a Latin teacher isn't exactly a growth field. I had an offer that I thought I was going to take: Brockton, MA, but when I went to see the school I'd be teaching in, everything about it made me want to cry. I just couldn't sign the papers.

Now I'm mired in studying for the MTEL, which I'm probably going to fail. I wouldn't be so upset if the damn thing wasn't so expensive; I don't know if I can afford a re-take. Everyone I've spoken to about the Latin test says that it's absurdly specific: if you haven't read the particular selections from the particular authors, you're in trouble. Good people fail it all the time. So between reading selections of Vergil, Cicero, Horace, Catullus, and Pliny the Younger which I have no idea are even the right ones, I have to try to remember the entire Greek language. I haven't even looked at Greek as more than a curiosity in the past three years.

As bad as it might seem, I've got some ideas for so-called "employment." I've seen quilts, little ones, selling for almost a hundered dollars. I know I could whip those out pretty quick. I've also looked into teaching Latin to homeschoolers and tutoring. There's always substitute teaching, too. I think I could be a "professional project finisher" for lazy knitters if I improved my skills a bit. I can do (or figure out quickly) everything but cables.

So, there are some bright spots. I do wonder if I'm just being really idiotic about all this, though. I guess we'll find out.