A year.

It's been one year since my father's suicide. We don't, however, know for sure that he killed himself on 10th of June since he was found on 11th. The pathologist didn't give any specific date on her autopsy report. In the first obituary the date was 11th. In the second one it was 10th, as it is in his tombstone as well. Two against one, so I guess it's today, then. Funny, though; according to a folktale, statistics say that Monday is the most common day for one to kill themselves. Last year 10th was Sunday, so I wonder who decided that he died on the 11th? Did someone decide?

My father's mother called me a while ago asking me if it was okay with me if she continued to take flowers to my father's grave. I find it ridiculous she even has to ask this; it doesn't matter how much our ideologies contradict but she is still my father's mother just as much as I am his daughter or my mother his wife, we all have equal rights to go to the tomb and take flowers or candles or whatever there. No other -that is, my mother, mainly- has the right to go and tell my grandmother she cannot visit her own son's grave because she and my mother have an argument.

Can't wait for next year when my little brother has his marticulation exams and -hopefully- graduates from high school. Then what? Should we have two separate parties: the other in which my mother would be and the other where my grandparents could be (since they are very likely not going to be in the same house, let alone in the same house with each other). But would that help? My mother, as the mother of the graduated, basically has every right to be with her son throughout the day of his graduation, so in that case holding separate parties won't make any difference. Will my mother even bear to be in the same big gym with my grandmother . Damn it... my grandmother keeps preaching the most stupid religious things to anybody around her but she doesn't have the spine to stand up for herself! .....I guess she practises what she preaches; on an old calender given to my father when he was younger had this on it: "Our greatest work is to learn to carry our cross silently." No wonder my father wasn't too happy to be forced to stay on that farm he grew up in an atmosphere like that. And I am pretty sure he was pressured to stay there, continue his father's and grandfather's work as a farmer. I dont' think he would have wanted to, maybe he wanted to be something else. But he stayed, being the oldest son (I doubt my aunt ever had to think she would be even a plausible option to continue the farm even if she had wanted to, being a woman). My uncle... he lives now in Helsinki with his family but I don't know when he moved there, or was he asked to take over the farm at any point.

The reason I think my grandmother pressured my father to stay is because she did the same thing to us, her grandchildren. She never directly asked me to take over the farm; I guess I have made it perfectlky clear I have no interest none whatsoever to go back (and I am not; not to the village, not to the town, ever). According to my sister she had asked her why she couldn't go there; our grandmother had told her she can very well study at the university (located approximately 120 kilometres from the farm) while living in that house. My little brother just turned eightteen but I'm sure his had his share of her mania due to his being "unspoilt" (as in, not studying anywhere else) and a male. Well, my little brother hasn't been to the house after he tried to kill himself, so I suppose he wasn't too inclined to act out her master plan, either. I wonder if she ever even thought about how this situation feels to us, the people she's trying to force to go back there. Of course she would want me or my sister get married and go back to live there and have children and no life of our own but the life she had. Did she ever think what we went through in that house; she keeps saying she knows what it was like but she doesn't, she wasn't there. She doesn't know how I used to wake up in the middle of the night with my parents shouting at each other. She doesn't know how my father would come into me and my sister's room drunk explaining something around three a.m. when I had a math's exam the following day (I was probably eight years old). She doesn't know how I misdialed the number to call the police on Christmas when my parents were fighting, my father drunk at the other end of the kitchen and my mother at the other end holding a knife. She doesn't know how I stayed silent when the cops came one Christmas time to take my drunken father away for the night and they asked me and my siblings questions if it's often like this. She doesn't know the humiliation when everyone in the village knew what my father was like and some kids thought it worthy of making fun of to me. She doesn't know any of this, so how can she tell us to oblige some thousand years old tradition.

When we were emptying the house for it to be sold, I found a note from my grandmother to my father among the Tieteen Kuvalehti piles I was to "inherit". The note had a newspaper clip about Minnesota treatment (meaning that even though my grandmother never publicly admitted it, she *did* acknowledge her son's alcoholism and that something should be done to it!) and some small book filled with Bible quotations or something of sorts, and on its inner cover there was my grandmother's scribble saying she loved her son. She kept repeating it, "her son". Not once his name, but "son". She kept repeating how important it was for her that "her son" would get better. Nothing about his children or anyone else my father's alcoholism caused misery.

I learned Halliday's systemic-functional grammar theory by heart already when I was ten. No wonder it's so easy for me now at the university.

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Reading now:
'We Need to Talk About Kevin'/'Poikani Kevin' by Lionel Shriver. I think I need to find something cheerful to read next. I've dwellt enough on dreradful matters long enough.