I didn't wear a suit.  I don't have a suit.  I could have worn a tie, but didn't.  Only a nice dark blue shirt and jeans.  Still, it got mighty hot standing in the sunlit cemetery.

Ninety-fours years and then some she lived on this earth.  She lived longer than her husband and two of her own daughters.  She had thirteen grandchildren, of which I am one, and thirteen great-grandchildren, of which my children are two.  I was one of a sextet of her grandsons who carried her to her grave, where she will lie next to her husband and one of her daughters.

When she was already too feeble to walk, but still had a sharp mind, I laid my infant son in her lap and gave her what may have been--to her--the best gift of all:  the knowledge that the family name would continue for another generation.

Then she descended slowly into the oblivion of Alzheimer's Disease:  a slow, lingering death that seemed to drain her soul a grain at time, just like the old cliché of sands through an hourglass.  Eventually there was nothing of her left but an animal shell.  This may seem harsh, but that is how it seemed to me.  Nothing of her really remained, just an animated body that kept fighting on, long past the time when the last of her real self had already gone on to another place.

At last the final, tenuous strand of that silver cord gave way, and she was free to go, no longer tethered to a body that must have become a prison for her.

I did not mourn today.  On the contrary, I felt glad for her to finally be relieved.  In my heart I said goodbye to her years ago.

As the graveside service ended and people broke up to talk and walk quietly among the tombstones, revisiting friends and loved ones already gone, several of her great-grandchildren began playing tag around her, yelling at each other and shrieking with laughter.  I think somewhere, she was probably laughing herself.

James at Hell In A Handbasket is talking about Long Guns and Hand Guns:

Most of my students react with puzzlement when I suggest that they buy a shotgun for home defense. Didn’t their favorite action hero always use a handgun in that movie they saw last week? And the police here in Columbus, Ohio restrict shotguns to the squad cars driven by Sergeants or those of higher rank. If a shotgun is so effective and handguns marginal man stoppers, why doesn’t every cop have one?

I was going to leave a comment but it ran kind of long so I'll just post it here with the reference.

This topic once came up at a place where I used to work.  I told the guy who had asked my advice to get a shotgun, and I added the remark, "all handguns are inherently underpowered, anyway."  There was another person there who was a .45 worshiper.  He immediately jumped on me.  "Even the .45?"  "Sure," I answered, "unless you're talking about pistols chambered for hunting rifle rounds, they're all underpowered."

I have to admit that I did this partly just to get this guy's goat, because I knew it would tick him off.  But from then on, if the topic of guns came up, and it came up often, he automatically ignored anything I said because I had once impugned what he thought was the ultimate in stopping power.

He wouldn't even listen to logical arguments about velocity and energy, because it was the .45, and therefore apparently sacrosanct.

I hope no one thinks that I have some kind of prejudice against the .45, because I don't.  But the encounter described above has always stuck in my mind, because it baffled me that someone wouldn't accept that a rifle was always better than a pistol, if you could get one.

Didn't some famous guy once say that a pistol is what you use to fight your way to your rifle?

Just in case anyone notices that the blogroll looks different, it's because I changed the settings to display blogs with the most recent posts first, instead of displaying them in alphabetical order.  That's all.