Mourning of Distance

Yesterday I had a fun night of laughter, fellowship, and delicious eats. One probably couldn't even tell that a "close" death had been made known to me earlier on that day. Personally, if particular circumstances or events don't affect the course of your day, your mood, or even what you focus on, than it shouldn't be of any significance right?

Well this was the death of my mom's dad, so my grandpa. The interesting matter about this death is that, for the life of me (literally), I've probably only seen him 5-6 times if anything? Each of these times wouldn't be long either as he resided in Hong Kong. With any family overseas, there tends to be distant separated my time zones, borders, culture, and lack of intimate communication, but the major reason why I've never felt my grandpa was close was because he wasn't close to my mom, in fact, none of my mom's side.

To keep ancient history short, basically my grandma never married my grandpa because when they were dating, his family had arranged him to marry a wealthier lady back in the day. However, he still came back to see my grandma and ended up having four children with her; respectively my mom and her older siblings (but he never cared for them). Can you see how asian-family-drama-esque this is sounding? Another interesting fact is that apparently to this day, his legally married wife and family tree doesn't know that our side of the family exists. It still intrigues me how we got the memo of his death if no one on his side of the family knows us... or so I thought.

When I was first texted the date and occurrence of the incident by one of my brothers, I was clueless and thought he meant the death anniversary of the husband of my grandma I live with who had died before I was born. It didn't make sense to me as I felt that was a very random text and it didn't answer the initial question I had posed to him, but that's a different story. Later in the day, when I saw my mom, she had told me that grandpa had died, and I honestly just brushed it off, but at the same time I felt like everything had made sense now, at least my brother's text did. Yet, I didn't feel anything, even though he died of old age, I didn't feel sad, or unfortunate, and I have not shed a single tear.

I'm making myself sound brutally cold hearted, but how is one to react to a death that is so distant? Physically and psychologically? Its as if this was a death I read in the paper, except I actually feel somewhat bitter and angry towards those innocent victims' murderers. Its a very odd scenario now that I ponder on it, and very weird when I think that my mom won't be going to her dad's funeral.