What can I say, rough chuckles.
Man, you wanna hear some rough chuckles?
My mom's best friend at her job died today, after a long battle with Cancer of the Everything. My mom all trucking down to Cooperstown every single night to just hold her hand and bring food to her friend's family for three or four weeks straight. It has been pretty hard on my mom.
So upon hearing this, I call my gramma... her mom... and those two are on pretty frosty terms, gramma and mom. Stuff from long before I was on this planet. And I have a long conversation that comes down to my trying to subtly say to my gramma "Hey, her best friend just died, maybe you could call her and not make her reach out to you this time?"
Because mom and gramma are basically those people in a play who won't talk to the other one until the other one talks to them and so on.
And... gramma's sympathetic to the fact that someone universally known as a Nice Lady died? But she also makes it indirectly clear that she still can't be the one to pick up the phone to mom. And then gramma gets to talking about how... y'know... sometimes it's a blessing to go if you know you're gonna go, so that the pain doesn't last forever and so on. The suffering ends and so on.
And she's all like "Mikey, when my time comes, I'm gonna put a plastic bag over my head and tie it off and go to sleep while I can still do it with my own two hands. Don't worry about me, it probably won't happen for a long time yet but goddamn it, I'm going out on my own terms. Throw a party in honour of that."
And... man, gramma. Rough chuckles.