For the first hour, it was an ordinary morning. I checked for updates on various social networking sites, I checked for emails at various addresses, and I even glanced at the BBC News. NBC's Tim Russert is dead– he died suddenly of a heart attack. Now, for some journalistic tributes.

Grandpa's on Skype. Still. What should I wear? It's the day of a funeral. Maybe I shouldn't just wear a t-shirt and slippers.

I search through my long-sleeved shirts for something suitable, but everything is wrinkled and stained. The red shirt is in much better shape than the white one. But the white one is more appropriate. I wear the white one, despite what look like coffee stains along the bottom. The suit jacket looks better than I remembered. I wear that too. Take a long shower, until the hot water is almost cold. It still isn't sinking in. Today is for mourning.

Finally, dressed, clean, with a bowl of cereal in my hands, I am ready to start. It hurts me that I didn't think to ask anyone what time the funeral is, but I can easily imagine a scenario:

Bright and early, the sun is just barely winking in over a thick shroud of fog; various members of the family pull themselves out of bed with the help of insistent alarm clocks, and early risers who would be up right now anyway.

Driving members of the family pick non-driving members up on a still-chilly morning, one rapidly warming up as the thick blanket of fog begins to dissipate. Then it's a last-minute rush to get to the funeral, twenty minutes early.

There it takes some waiting. There are a lot of people who don't know each other, in a church where every last priest, choir-boy, and member of the congregation knew Grandpa. There are hymns.

Thousands of miles away I select Mozart's Requiem, and put it in the CD player.

The beginning of the Requiem feels all wrong, but I play it anyway-- I don't know what would be more appropriate after all. I've laid out the pictures of both of them, on either side of the stereo, and lit some candles I found in the cellar. Looking at the four photos in front of me, it all just seems too much. I nearly choke on my last mouthful of cereal. Raise my hands in incomprehension, and turn away, feeling tears welling up, a flood of frustration, and loss.

Yesterday, my phone rang.

When I saw the Caller ID was unavailable, I knew it was North America. I assumed that it was everyone on the Brenneman side of the family, gathered together in one room, and we'd spend the next ten or fifteen minutes passing me along from one cousin or aunt to another, asking each other (but really ourselves), how we are all doing over and over again; collectively acknowledging shock, sadness, and yet a courageous strength in the face of it all.

Instead it was my mother, in tears.
Who would have thought? My grandmother just died.
"That's really strange," I told her. "Grandpa Brenneman just died."

My mother gulped, and there was a moment of silence. . .

"I'm sorry," she told me but it was understood that she was no more able to feel this, than I was that Nana McLean died.
How can you mourn over two people at once? At the moment there is no answer, just numb disbelief.

Grandpa Brenneman and Nana McLean probably did at one point meet, but I'm sure they wouldn't have known each other particularly well. Who'd have thought that these two people would become linked by death, rather than by life? What force in the universe came up with the idea of killing these two people within days of each other, so that now I'd be forced to sit here and try to mourn the both of them together?

While most of my family are watching Grandpa Brenneman's tomb being lowered into the ground, I'm sitting in front of a computer screen, writing an eulogy for Nana McLean. But mourning for her is easier. The truth is, I started two years ago when she had her stroke – I knew this would happen soon, and I thought it would happen sooner.

Standing here now, it is the photos of Grandpa Brenneman which bring me to tears. I need do no more than glance over at any of the three shoddy black-and-white prints I'd made at the radio station last night – perhaps I should have been prepared. But I wasn't.

He wears a lopsided grin in all three photos; I took them at the AmTrak Station the last time I saw him in 2005, while we were waiting six hours for the train to come and whisk me away.

He waited there with me the entire time.
I never told him how much I appreciated that.

Grandpa is still on Skype, as if to dare me to

...

[19:15:16] Johnny Bliss says: Rest in peace, you old adventurer.
[19:15:24] Johnny Bliss says: I love you goddamnit.