When geeks grieve.

Thank you to everyone for your sympathy. My grandmother’s funeral was on Tuesday, and I couldn’t be there, but I hope to visit her gravestone later this year or next year. My lingering grief is not so much for the loss of my Nana, because I’ve dealt with that for years, but for the realization that You can’t go home again.

There are so many relatives of mine on Facebook, all able to attend the funeral and a cousin’s upcoming wedding. Another cousin, who hasn’t seen me in at least 13 years, said, “I wish you could be here, Em,” and I just about broke down. My mother lives with me, so she could share memories of Nana, but it hit me, hard, that no one else in my life out here knew her. Grieving, I think, should be a communal activity.

So I did the next best thing: I brought Nana into my community. I scanned some photos and posted them in my blogs and on Facebook. Then I used Google Maps to look at my Nana’s home, now owned by someone else. While the land around the house is largely unchanged (to my Modesto-born son’s eyes, it looked like Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “Big Woods”), there’s a fresh coat of paint and a new addition in the back. Like her children and grandchildren, it’s not a house my Nana would have recognized.

But I refuse to focus on that.

For in those slightly blurry pixels of that oh-so-green Central Maine town I always think of as home, my Nana lives, making “fritters” in the carpeted kitchen and saying, “Hark!” when the grandkids had gotten so loud she couldn’t hear herself think. At the risk of being uber-nerdy, I can’t help but think of “Star Trek” (and “Seinfeld”): She’s not really dead if we find a way to remember her. I think I found a way, with a little help from my (online) friends. :)