Tag: funeral

Practice Tomorrow

Band practice is on for 10:00am tomorrow. Morning practice is weird, but it will work. Hopefully the bass player’s family will all be awake before all the noise starts (eek!).

I told the other guys that I put it on my Google Calendar so there’s no backing out now. We’ll see. Lucy still has about 26 hours to pull the football away from Charlie Brown (me).

237/365

I’m rewatching the three new episodes of Andor right now. I’m up to the third episode with that scene with Bix. It is fucking disturbing and really hard to watch. Star Wars for adults is a pretty accurate description of this show.

What else… I don’t know. One work day to survive before the weekend arrives. It’s going to be a long day, I fear. I haven’t taken any pictures of cats yet. I’m sure the opportunity will arise eventually.

I also haven’t looked at the news yet today. I’m always afraid to do so. I’m always in a borderline state of panic to learn about what fresh nazi hell was unleashed overnight. I’m so tired of living in “interesting times.” Fuck this. I want my country back. Failing that, I want my state to just leave and start over. 249 years was a good run, I guess.

What else… I don’t know. Here’s hoping for a nice easy work day followed by a nice and calm weekend… that includes my cousin’s husbands wake… fuck. The universe is just piling on. Hopefully there are brighter, less depressing, less fascist days ahead. Now, where did I put those two cats?

Well, That was Painful

I did a little funeral planning today. My step daughter, Bellana, is going to sing a song at the service and I had to call the parish musical director to get a copy of the arrangement. I mentioned whose funeral it was and she got all sad. She knew my parents and extended her condolences. She said she hoped my mother was doing okay.

Well, in her defense, my parents stopped going to this church when they moved out of town about three years ago. The music director hadn’t seen or heard from them at all over that time. While my mother’s funeral a year and a half ago was in this very same church, I did not expect her to remember that.

Still… I’m already feeling pretty low over losing my father but then to have to share that my mother’s been gone for over a year. Yeah, that was a bit of a gut punch. Ouch, babie. Ouch.

Dad’s wake is the day after tomorrow. The funeral is the day after that.

Planning

We went over some plans for the funeral service. We also wrote out an obituary. For the service it feels like there are more things to do than we have people to do them. It’s frustrating. As always, I want to make everyone happy and I just can’t.

There was some talk of my father’s will tonight. that weirded me out in a major way. I’m sure there will be more to come, but it’s something I never wanted to think about and now that it has begun, I want it even less.

Miss Robin tried to make me feel better. She’s fluffy and cute so that’s something she’s good at.

As for tomorrow? No idea. I want to spend time with my wife. I want to spend time with music. I want to go grocery shopping. I want to jump into the car with Jen and run away and not come back for days. So… the usual Saturday thinking.

Friday Ramblings

Is ramblings the right word? Should I have called this masterpiece of literary genius “Friday Mumblings” instead? We may never know.

Has anyone else found that they have become chemically depended on GPS apps while driving anywhere? We have a meeting scheduled for 4:00 today at the funeral home to start going over the arrangements. I know where this place is. I grew up less than a mile from it (Google maps tells me it is 0.8 miles from the house I grew up in) and I could probably find it with my eyes closed in the middle of a blizzard. Why then did I just email the address to myself so that I can plug it into a GPS app on my phone when I head over there in about 80 minutes? Why can’t I just… ya know… go? Why do I need a bunch of satellites in orbit of the Earth to tell me when the next turn is coming up? What did I do to my brain?

A year and a half ago, when my mother passed away, we had a similar meeting with the funeral director booked and we all went into it without the faintest clue of what we were in store for. Now? Today? We know exactly what’s coming and somehow that makes this whole experience more depressing. It’s a little less stressful and a lot less intimidating, but it is so much more depressing. Of all the things to be pro’s at… yeah, this shouldn’t be one of them.

Complete and total change of subject… When the forth and final season of The Umbrella Academy came out a couple of weeks ago I jumped right into it. It was only six episodes (the previous three seasons were all 10 each) and as I was watching the fifth episode I declared to myself (and no one else because why would anyone else care) that when I finished the finale I was going to immediately go back and watch the whole series from start to finish.

I did exactly that, and I finished it yesterday. Just in time for new seasons of Rings of Power and Only Murders in the Building to launch. I watched the first episode of each show (there are two more Rings of Power episodes available and I’ll get to them shortly). While I was waiting for Rings of Power to come back I started reading The Silmarillion and woah babie, is that puppy a slog. I’m on chapter 19 and so far the entire book has been 100% exposition. It’s like a textbook only less interesting. I know at some point it’s going to tie into the Lord of the Rings at least a little bit, but good heavens is it tough to get through. Maybe had Tolkien lived to finish it himself it might have been more readable… then again, maybe not. Yikes.

I’ll tell you what though, Rings of Power is making me want to grab the third Lord of the Rings book and read the appendixes. I’m sure I’ve made it through them at least once before, but maybe I should pay closer attention. It’s tough to read through a couple of hundred (or however long the appendix is) pages of a book that come after the book ended, but you gotta do what you gotta do.

What else should I write about before my lunch break ends and I get back to work for an hour before leaving early to go to the funeral home? I don’t know. Retail therapy… that might be a thing. All of the sadness and stress of the last few weeks. It’s possible that some new camera gear, or a new guitar, or a trip to Manhattan or the mountains might be the only things that can straighten me out. Just a thought, you know? The punchline to this joke is that I am not joking. I’m being serious. Oh well… it will be okay. We’ll get through this together. My father would not have wanted any of us to be all sad. He’d want us to focus on the good rather than stress over the bad. Although having said that, he was an Olympic level, world class worrier himself so… yeah. I love you, dad.

Services

I am working in the office today. I’ve had a few meetings and I just wrapped up my lunch. I have another meeting booked for 45 minutes from now but I will be leaving for the day shortly after it starts. Today is my Uncle Jim’s wake. It’s actually a lot closer to my office building than it is to home so working from here actually makes getting there a ton easier. Otherwise I probably would have taken the whole day off. I took tomorrow off as I will be going to the funeral in the morning.

It’s so sad the way my mother’s family has fallen apart over the last year. Three of the four siblings passed away within nine months of each other. Only the baby in the family is left and she has some health concerns of her own. It’s been a tough year for the extended family. I am one of 22 first cousins and most of us are on a facebook messenger chat together. Anytime I get a notification of an update to that chat I get scared. It shouldn’t be like that, but it is. Hopefully we can all find a way to generate some happy news in the next year. I don’t know how, but maybe we can figure it out.

Speaking of happier news, Harry is coming home tonight. He needs to have some work done on his car and he is taking it to a shop near us because he couldn’t find a shop near Burlington, VT that could schedule him any time soon. We’re not sure how long he’ll be home. It will be at least as long as the car fix takes. Hopefully he’ll watch a Doctor Who or two with me. I bet I can talk him into it.

Okay, lunch break is over. Time to go back to work for the shortened afternoon.

Who Didn’t See That Coming

Three days after my mother’s wake and the announcements have started. My cousin tested positive for Covid-19. My sister’s sister-in-law also tested positive for Covid-19.

With all the hand shaking and hugging going on at the wake and at the funeral, it was inevitable that Covid would be passed around. Yippee.

Jen and I both tested negative this morning. So far, so good for our house. Fingers crossed it continues, and fingers crossed it doesn’t spread any further.

Stupid effing pandemic ruining my mother’s services.

We Made It

We made it through the funeral and the cemetery and the after luncheon. That’s actually still going on but it’s wrapping up.

It was painful but good. We all came unglued a few times but we are all okay. My dad did great. He left the lunch a little early but he made it nearly all the way through. I’m proud of him.