Tuesday, January 9th 2007

After the start of 07, the dinner and then Mom’s birthday, I crashed. We both did. I felt so drained that I could think of nothing more than a complete state of vegetation in front of the TV with a big fat joint. We rented three movies: The Oh in Ohio with Parker Posey, The Family Stone; a personal fave and Strangers with Candy, The Movie. The first two were great while Strangers was too long with too much of “that humor.” We ate macaroni and cheese with our personal blankets on our own recliners. It was a great day of absolutely doing nothing.

I regrouped just in time for my dad’s memorial service. My dad has been gone for eight years come February and Ma H now felt comfortable enough to put Pops somewhere where the rest of the family could visit him. Some other relatives are also there so having dad there made sense.

I was dreading the day for two reasons. One, there would be a little gathering back at ma’s house complete with a large order of food and people to feed and look after. It’s rough to have people and such in your house especially when you are not in the mood. It was family however, and it had been eight years since the last I had seen some of them. The second reason was I did not want to re-live the experience of death and sadness all over again. As soon as we entered it was just as I thought it would be; people dressed in black, tip toeing around as if the people living out eternity in the wall next to them were going to wake up if they spoke, coughed or farted. It was much better than I thought it would be. The priest incorporated a lot of humor into the service and kept the entire thing under 15 minutes. His approach and delivery was appreciated.

So now my sisters, my brother and Ma H all have a little keepsake of dad. My brother has a little pendant with his portion of Dad in it. It is a little vial resembling something you might have seen in “24″ or James Bond. I chose a simple wooden urn about 5 inches tall. It will sit nicely on the wall and will Velcro to the dashboard keeping me company while I drive back to California.

This entry was posted by Johnny on Tuesday, January 9th, 2007 at 10:58 PM and is filed under Ancient History, It's All Relative. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.