When I Am Old I Shall Wear Purple.

okay, well basically, i found out on Sunday (7th) that my Auntie Julie died of a heart attack on Friday (5th). she wasn't even 40, though I'm not sure on her exact age. we weren't close but she was my auntie and i looked forward to seeing her and being the weird novelty relative who's always fun to be around and chat to about weird arty things and to invite round for coffee and never mean it though the thought's still there. when my mum said she needed to talk to me i knew immediately that someone had died, but i thought it was going to be my Grandpa. it's very very strange how you just know when it's something that huge. she told us straight that Julie had died and my brother started crying and my mum's eyes welled up and i just sat there. i couldn't do anything. i didn't know what to do, to be brutally honest, i didn't feel like crying, i did, but i don't know why, it wasn't as if they were just tears to look like i felt something, I'm pretty sure they were genuine, it's just it didn't feel like me crying, it felt like my little wire man from art was behind my eyes pumping out the tears. i just felt empty for a few minutes and then i went for a shower.
whenever i think about her now, i just get the urge to tell a tasteless joke, like i was looking through my 'special stuff' box and i found a book she'd given me called 'When I Am Old, I Shall Wear Purple' and instead of feeling sadness over her passing, all i thought was, not anymore you're not.
now, I'm either:
Suppressing all this emotion and it will come out later.
Unable to deal with the devastating idea that i will never again see someone who played such an important role in my mother's side of the family.
Or I'm simply an unfeeling emotionally stunted shit.
I'm not sure i like any of those options, half of me quite fancies the idea that I'm unable to face my emotions, i think that's a nicer alternative to just not feeling.
how are you supposed to feel when something like this happens?
people say that grieving is a personal process and it's different for everybody, but I'm simply not grieving.
maybe my horrible jokes are my way of dealing with this?
but that can't be true, i mean sure that's a mechanism for dealing with silly teenage problems like your boyfriend cheating on you, not the death of a relative?

also, another thing that i did when i was told was get a really good idea for a short story. then i thought about that for a while. akin to what Neil Gaiman's Shakespeare was saying, that as a writer he will always experience things with half of himself observing. as much as i like the idea of being able to identify with some of his writing, i don't feel okay that it was at Julie's expense. is it really at her expense.

i think i was crying more for my cousins than i was for Julie, they don't have a mother anymore, and my uncle lives in Mexico.

I'm not sure whether i pride myself on being emotionally retarded. i think, don't be stupid, that's a stupid thing to be proud of, and then the other half of me goes, of course you'd say that because to have a genuine problem you have to deny that you have a problem, and you'd like to have a problem in your boring middle class life wouldn't you.

i really don't know, i wish i did know, life would be so much easier if there was a set text that you could deviant from at will, but check up on every now and again... just to make sure you were the safe kind of weird, the cool kind of quirky, the okay kind of strange. and not just fucked or simply normal (oh the temptation to say something incredibly pretentious like 'same thing isn't it?' is rather large).

my sister's written a letter to Julie about how much she loved her and how she was sorry she didn't get to say it to her when she was alive.
I'm not sure what i would have put in my version.

Dear Julie
It was lovely knowing you, though i never spent much time around you i knew you were a nice person who was always ready for a girly laugh and a cup of coffee over which you could gossip about people we both knew. it would have been fun to go on a shopping trip with you, Livvie and mum. it's funny thinking that you're never going to be at Steepways anymore, parking your bum on the aga or suggesting it was time to go to the pub or yelling at Livvie and I aged eight or nine to 'shut the hell up or I'll put you in separate bedrooms'. I'm glad that you made Livvie invite me to all of her birthdays and looked after me when they abandoned me for makeup and more attractive girly things. Thank you for offering to house me if i got into art school in cheltenham, and though it was never going to happen at least now we have a good excuse for it not to have. and thank you for the years of HMV vouchers.
I think I'm going to miss you like I'd miss Steepways if it fell down, you were an integral, if not central part of my childhood.