my grandfather died a few hours ago. i got a call about half an hour after arriving back in austin with avram's family, having just driven from dallas, that he had died shortly after being moved from the icu to a hospital room. he got to say goodbye to myself and everyone in my family today, and he also got to meet avram's family yesterday. we found out this morning that he was not going to get any better, so my dad decided to move him into a hospital room where they'd simply stop treating him with anything except oxygen to help him breathe. it's amazing how we hold on to our suffering fellow humans, but that we are willing to "humanely" put our animals to sleep. anyway, we were expecting a long period of him wasting away from either lack of nutrition or infection or any number of things. but this evening when my dad and briana were there to see him, briana asked him if he was in pain. he told her he was, so they put him on morphine to ease the pain, and a few hours after my family said goodbye to him, he died.

much earlier today, i woke up at 6am screaming from a nightmare. i dreamt that i was in a beautiful house and everyone was giving me gifts. i was not happy about any of the gifts. i felt totally numb. instead of being joyful, i was almost robotically taking the gifts into this sort of basement space, which was still outside somehow, surrounded by trellises with vines. i'd receive some gifts upstairs, then take them downstairs to the basement, where it was dark but filled with a sort of full-moon light. i would hide the gifts behind a trellis. at one point, i was walking around the front of the trellis and i stepped on something. i looked down and there were two bodies covered in white sheets. they were small bodies, like children's, but i knew who they belonged to--my grandfathers. that's when i screamed and woke up.