One day at a time

I’ve been avoiding this blog… mostly because I’m still wandering about in the land of loss, pain and disbelief. I’m beginning to wonder if anyone intimately touched by violence, anyone left bereft by violence, ever really leaves this place fully.

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We thought at the beginning that Aaron had shot Jude and then himself; that was the first report we got. Later on we discovered that Jude had shot Aaron – during an episode of domestic violence – and then killed herself.

I tell myself that I don’t understand, that I’ll never understand, why Jude – and for that matter, Aaron – had to die like that. But I think, if I’m honest with myself, I can all too easily understand.

There comes a point when abuse and violence boil over and all the sane responses flee and all the possibilities narrow to one, single, destructive option.  And while none of us will ever really know for certain what happened, I believe with all my heart that Jude did what she did because at that moment, a moment that probably seemed like a hellish eternity, there was only one possibility.

People talk about abuse victims like gossips over the back fence with a particularly salacious story to share. They wonder why women stay with abusers. They wonder why we don’t just leave when he hurts us… I can tell you. Abuse makes us vulnerable. It’s like the wind in the desert, eating away at your strength, your will, your ability to make rational decisions. It eviscerates the you that you thought you were. Pretty soon you’re like one of those gravity-defying formations – at risk of being toppled by the next big blow. You’ll grasp at any promise, at any and all the insufficient apologies, trying to shore yourself up. You’ll do your damnedest to make things work because you know – you really know – that you’re not nearly strong enough to walk away.

Some of us eventually find a way to leave... too, too many of us do not.

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I understand why it’s called heartache…

About the time it seems that I’m doing better I discover that the unbelievable pain is still there – it grabs me and throws me to the ground again, leaving me broken and defenseless.  People keep trying to give me solace. I love them for it, but…

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I am so looking forward to the day when my thoughts of Jude are the kind of happy memories that everyone tells me I should be thinking.

I love you Jude. I'll miss you forever.

Things like this aren't supposed to happen

I'm having trouble breathing past the tightness and the pain. Jude is dead. Now my family has a Jude-sized hole in it. And it really hurts.

Tomorrow is her birthday. She would be 37.

Your children are supposed to live much longer than you.

I didn't give birth to Jude, but she was my daughter... extended families are like that. The strange, difficult combinations and permutations can give us lovely connections that would not have happened otherwise. The pain of the relationships that don't quite work is sometimes offset by the joy that an extra son or daughter or sister or brother brings.

Oh, Jude was clever, kind, stubborn, generous, opinionated, gentle, loving, smart, beautiful... She laughed a lot at herself and rarely at others. She took in strays (animals and people) and loved them unconditionally. Family was everything for her.

She loved her husband. And I believe that he loved her too, but he also hurt her a lot. She came up to Minnesota last year to get away from him. She told me she felt really good with the decision to leave, that she loved him immensely, but couldn't handle the the violence. It seemed like she was in a good place about it all. She hoped to find a job and stay up here.

The job didn't quickly materialize. And I think he started calling her, making promises. He must have convinced her that it really was going to be different. Maybe he said he'd get therapy, seek counseling... I don't know. Jude didn't tell me and after she went back our conversations were mostly Facebook posts - short, funny, trivial... I didn't want her to feel like I would criticize her for a decision I might also have made if I were in her situation...

I guess I'll never understand why anyone would ever hurt someone they loved.

Today we found out that they are dead. We think that sometime this week he killed her and then killed himself.

I really, really cannot believe this happened. Oh, fuck, it hurts. It hurts.
What I really want to do right now is gather everyone close and take care of them, protect them.

Jude - I love you. I can't stand it that he took you away from us.

The Wall - Waiting for the Extraordinary Things

I made a small mosaic the other day for a friend. It was her 60th birthday.

At the party someone asked me about soul-mates... inferring that I had said at a previous party that I believe in them. This is an old topic at the parties, and for some strange reason, a bit controversial...

So, rather than get back into the topic (it was too early in the evening and not enough alcohol had been consumed to make the discussion interesting - consumed by others since I don't do alcohol - a whole 'nother story there...) I simply said "I believe that just about anything is possible." "Wise answer," my questioner replied. Luckily, before she could keep on about soul-mates, one of the others at the party quoted Alicia from the movie A Beautiful Mind - "I need to believe that something extraordinary is possible."

The birthday friend, who is very much concerned with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict said, "Extraordinary things are not possible..." She can't see how a peaceful resolution can happen.

I admit that my response to her comment and the situation is more emotional than informed - which is often the case for me; the feelings get in the way of the thinking sometimes. And even when I try to think critically about the issues I often feel like many of the world's problems are insurmountable (and so why should any of us try?)...

But I've decided that I'm not going to quit thinking about them and talking about them and trying to learn about them.

And I'm not about to stop making art about them...

It was strange because when I made this mosaic I had no idea why I made it like it is.

The Wall, 4" x 8", marble, recycled glass.

I loved the materials when I placed them side-by-side on the worktable. The cream-colored marble has a slight orange veining in it and somehow feels both smooth and gritty at the same time. The background is Rain Forest Green marble (because of how it looks, not that it comes from a rain forest). And the red is a recycled, tumbled, landscape glass that I've cut into sharp slivers. They looked beautiful together - until I started cementing them down... then they made me a bit uncomfortable.

Once I finished the white line I realized that it was "the wall." And the red represents the bloodshed on both sides.

It could be any wall, any division between people that results in bloodshed and tragedy.

For my friend this was about the Middle-east conflict. I think she (like me) loves this piece but finds it hard to look at/think about.

And the extraordinary things - I do believe that they are possible, but we don't get to pick and choose which extraordinary thing is going to happen. We cannot force things to turn out according to what we think is best, how we would fix the problems. We have to learn to recognize when something extraordinary is looking us right in the face. We have to learn to find the extraordinary in the ordinary, or even in the tragic - the transcendent moments in our mundane lives.

Today is Dad's Birthday

He'd be 82. I miss him.

I wish he was here so that I could call him, although I rarely did (*shame*) when he was alive.

He was born in 1929 - the end of the Roaring Twenties - the same year as Martin Luther King Jr., Dick Clark, Grace Kelly, Imelda Marcos, Audrey Hepburn, Anne Frank, Jackie Kennedy Onassis, Yassar Arafat,   and countless others.

In the months before his birth Mother Teresa arrived in Calcutta, a revolt (José Gonzalo Escobar and Jesús María Aguirre) failed in Mexico, and Herbert Hoover was inaugurated as the 31st U.S. President.

He was 3 months old when the first public demonstration of color TV was conducted.

He was 4 months old when a secret decree in Russia created the gulags and the Geneva Convention was signed.

He was just 7 months old when the Stock Market crashed.

He was not quite 8 months old when the 7.2 magnitude Grand Banks earthquake occurred, snapping transatlantic telegraph cables and triggering a tsunami.

He was 8 months old when the Museum of Modern Art opened in NYC.

During my father's first year Pablo Picasso painted two cubist works, Woman in a Garden and Nude in an Armchair, the first Academy Awards were given, and Popeye debuted in the comics. ^Source

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Let me tell you about him...

He was extraordinary in his willingness to examine any topic, any idea, any belief that he held. If you had a good argument or explanation he'd be willing to meet you halfway.

He taught me how to look at a problem as something that had a solution, rather than an insurmountable obstacle to complain about.

He taught me how to use tools, how to fix things, how to be more independent and sure of my self than most young women.

He wasn't all that comfortable with us as babies, but as we became able to "do" stuff with him he enjoyed our interactions. He got better with babies as time went along, and was a pro with his grandkids.

He loved cars, and motorcycles and trucks - loved reading about them, looking at them, shopping for them, having them, fixing them, giving them to us.

He often had pit passes to the Indy 500 and Daytona.

He wanted to live to be 100, but said, as he was dying "I've had a great life, not too many regrets. Take care of your mother for me..."

More about my dad

^{Source: Wikipedia}

Death of a long-ago friend

I just learned that a friend from years back died from a heart attack this past Friday. He wasn't even 50. It's very sad.

And even sadder, while I remember him - having been reminded of him through his death - I do not remember his face. And I know that, when I lived in the commune, I talked to this man nearly every day, at least for a few years. I probably cooked his breakfast on numerous occasions...

It's sad when we forget people who have been part of our lives, only to remember them - and then only in bits and pieces - when they die.

I've found that death affects me much more profoundly now - especially after my dad's death. Even the death of kittens can make me weepy. But I also feel the celebration/joy of someone's life so much more profoundly now too... It's a double-edged sword, and all-in-all I'm glad for it.

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Thoughts on the Death of a Friend

It seems to me, after these past 10 days, that the death of a dear one makes us feel like we are ourselves lost.

Tragic, unexpected, untimely death is much harder to deal with. It is a surreal experience - in some ways - both physically and mentally intense, wretchedly transcendent in regard to the anguish we feel…

For days we have walked around with a kicked-in-the-stomach feeling, breathing deep was difficult, looking in each other’s eyes was nearly impossible. The patterns of our daily life have a new gap in them and our connections with the world are fewer and more tenuous.

I have felt both terribly empty and terribly full, and both are made of pain.

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Chad

A great friend is gone and today, or tomorrow they are turning off the machines that are keeping his body alive. A new experience for me and one I would greatly have preferred not to experience.

Let me tell you about Chad.

Chad was a great artist. Not your typical artist working with brushes on canvas or sculpting something beautiful... at least not in the way you normally think of painting and sculpting. Chad's artistry was done with ink and needles, his canvas was skin, his sculptures were our human bodies. Chad was a tattoo artist. A brilliant one.

Sometimes gifted people can be blinded by their own magnificence. Not Chad. He nurtured people he saw as destined to shine brighter than himself with a true enthusiasm and a pure passion to see them succeed. He collaborated where others in his position might have chosen to compete. He demanded excellence of himself, and his collaborators - and celebrated those rare moments of artistic transcendence with boundless joy.

Chad believed in people. He weighed them with a generous heart, and found few lacking. Those who were fortunate enough to be counted as a friend knew unstinting love and bountiful support.

We are all walking wounded today,
Hollow, achy, empty inside,
Wandering the land of disbelief and despair,
Our friend is gone, he has died.

His friends are grieving

See Chad's work

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The Greene County Daily World

Dad's obituary was in the weekly paper one year ago today, along with a photo of him with his motorcycle (although they cropped most of the motorcycle out of the image). It said:

Keith L. May, 78, of Linton, passed away at 8:45 p.m., Friday, August 31, 2007 at his residence.
He was born on March 25, 1929, the son of Curtis and Emma (Wilson) May. He served in the U.S. Army and was a veteran of the Korean War. He worked as a truck driver, a regional service representative for Fiat, a service manager at a foreign car dealership, and later worked for Williams Brothers Pharmacy in delivery until his retirement in July of 2007. He was a memeter of the Bloomington Masonic Lodge and the Linton Goldwing Club.
Survivors include his wife whom he married June 22, 1956, Constance E. (Johnston) May of Linton; two daughters, Monta Gael May (Wes Miller) of Winona, MN and Michelle (Chris) Mattox of Bloomfield; two sons Aaron Douglas May (Jennifer Sparks) of Bloomfield and Brian Keith (Susan) May of Atoka TN; two sisters Mary Jo May of Bedford and Wanda Rush of Bloomington; one brother, Bill May of Bedford; 11 grandchildren Aluna, Nova, Sheba, Emerald, Eli, Aaron (Erin), Tena, Rebecca, Jessica, Blaise and Ava; and two great-grandchildren Taylor and Dominic.
He was preceded in death by his father Curtis May; mother Emma May-Stancombe; and a brother Harry May.
Memorial services were held at the Welch & Cornett Funeral Home, Linton Chapel, at 11:00 on Tuesday.
Online condolences can be sent to the family at www.welchcornett.com.

There was also a color photo of dad on the front page of the paper.

The week's front page headlines were:
Counterfeit bills surface in Linton
Police have suspect in bomb threat cases
Families help break ground on new homes
Music fesitval exceeds expectations

We were already home in Winona when the weekly paper came out. My mother got copies of the paper for all of us. I have copies of the newspaper for all of the kids. I haven't given them to them. The papers are sitting on my dresser. This is the first I have looked at them in a year.

The last time I saw my father

Last year at this time I saw my father for the very last time.

He was laying on a table in the mortuary. Cold and smooth. I touched his face, I held his hand, I could not let him go without doing those things.

9-1-2007

I started this blog on August 2nd of last year. I had just learned my father was dying of lung cancer. The bridge in Minneapolis had just collapsed, or was collapsing - I cannot quite remember the order of things.

One year ago yesterday, one year and 12 hours ago, my father died. I was on the road, desperately trying to get there before he passed on. I did not make it.

One year ago today I was helping with funeral arrangements, trying to transfer airline tickets for our daughters and granddaughter to fly in from Las Vegas, and trying to arrange a ticket for our son, Eli, to fly down from Winona (he stayed home since we had more people than would fit in the station wagon and we never dreamed my father would die that night).

Eli's ticket was not a problem. Transferring the girls' tickets was a nightmare. In the end we ended up spending nearly $3,000 for the airline tickets we purchased that day and the ones we had purchased two days before, since they would not let us transfer the original tickets without paying fees and the difference between the ticket prices. That would have been more than buying new tickets, so we bought new tickets. After that we learned that the initial ticket order had been duplicated and so we owned 8 tickets. Nova and Taylor would fly in from Vegas that night. Aluna would fly in the next morning so that she could work her shift (it was impossible to get a substitute at that late notice). Eli would fly down from Minnesota that night, just a couple hours ahead of Nova and Tay. Eli doesn't drive, didn't drive, so Princess and Matt took him to the airport - a 2-hour drive from Winona.

I am amazed now, looking back, that it all worked out.

One year ago...

I made the biggest mistake I can remember making.

My father was dying. We knew this. Over the last few days he had nearly stopped eating. The lung cancer that had metastasized and taken up residence in his bones was winning. We knew it would, he knew it would - but we thought he had a few months to live. They told us at the end of July that he had two to nine months to live.

The 31st was a Friday. Wednesday of that week my mother had called and said she thought he wasn't going to be with us much longer. I called the girls in Vegas right after that phone call and told them they needed to get to Indiana if they wanted to see their grandfather before he died. Nova had been there in July. Aluna had taken a new job that summer and did not feel that she could take time off. When I told her she needed to get to Indiana now, she went to her new boss and got the time off and made plans to fly herself, Nova and Tay out the following Tuesday.

What was my mistake you ask? The mistake I made was putting my job and my normal life ahead of my father and my family. In all honesty, none of us expected him to pass that day. So I went to work in the morning with plans to leave around noon.

It's a 10-hour drive from Winona to my parent's home in Linton Indiana. If I had piled everyone in the car and left early in the day we would have made it in time.

Instead, leaving at noon meant that we were somewhere between Bloomington/Normal and Danville, Illinois when my brother called to tell us that my father had passed away. They told me that he knew - as much as one can know in the final hours of life - that we were coming, but he just could not wait for us to be there. He died at 8:45pm.

I wasn't there. Forever I will know that my decision to work those 4 or 5 hours meant that I was racing down a highway in a futile attempt to be there when my father died.

I hate it sometimes, that my family is so spread out over the country. I know something like this will happen again.

MacKenzie Died

                                                      Photo by Gareth

It is s sad, sad morning. I just found a phone message on my cellphone about MacKenzie. I hate the way that messages sometimes do not show up until days after they come in.

On June 3rd a gentleman called and left this message: "I am calling about your orange cat. I thought you would want to know that I found him in my yard dead a couple days ago."

This means MacKenzie died the night he got out. All the hope that he would come home has been false hope. That hurts. All the late night searching, barefoot, in pajamas, after hearing a cat outside the window, was in vain. Mac will not be coming home.

It also hurts me that since I did not find the message on my phone for over two weeks, that his body is gone and I cannot hold him one more time and bury him beside Kai. I really, really do not want to know where his body went.

I hope it was not the garbage. I so hope it wasn't.

Robert Rauschenberg

Oh no.

Robert Rauschenberg has died.

As an interdisciplinary artist who works in a number of media, often combining media, materials and techniques in a single piece, I have always been rather awed and inspired by Rauschenberg. He was one of the first to tell me that I did not have to be just a painter, just a sculpture, just a fiberist.

He did Art Cars.

I like combinations, integrations, adulterations. I like experimentation. I like coming face-to-face with the unexpected. In art and in life. I suppose I like being shocked (at least a bit).

I love the way Rauschenberg was constantly re-inventing both himself and his practice, and thereby, the world - at least as far as art is concerned...

Rauschenberg's Bed and Satellite (both done in 1955) and numerous other pieces of his work (especially those using fabric, yarns & cords, feathers, rocks to express memory and identity) have informed my practice and my context as a fiberist and sculptor in significant and meaningful ways. One of my current works-in-progress is directly inspired by Rauschenberg's work.

Today has been rough

It has been five months since my dad died. I was not certain. I had to count on my fingers to figure it out.

Sometimes it feels like such a long time. Sometimes it feels like it just happened.

Cancer can be so hard on everyone. Both my parents had a brush with it. My father had colon cancer 14 years ago, and survived, miraculously considering the growth in his colon was the size of a large grapefruit. No one expected him to make it. My mother at that time had just lost her sister to pancreatic cancer and a good friend to ovarian cancer, and when she heard the doctor say that my dad had cancer she just sort of shut down. I had just moved back into their household with my five kids (ages 5 - 15), and was working full-time and going to school full-time too. I ended up at times being the primary caretaker for my dad since my mother had such a problem with it all. She had to disconnect a bit in order to get through it all. She knew it but could not help it. It was okay, after all. It was a way to get past it and go on.

About 7 years ago my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer (which did not show up adequately enough for a diagnosis on a mammogram until she'd had it for around two years). This time she was as solid as a rock about it all. I do not know if it was because it was her and not someone she loved that was facing it or what the reason was for the stoic and peaceful approach to the diagnosis and treatments. Perhaps it was because my father had survived his cancer... Maybe inside she was just as upset and simply did not feel she should burden us with that. I was not there much. I do not know.

Anyway she is healthy right now and has been for years now.

However, my father, during a routine checkup at the veteran’s hospital this past June, was told he had some "suspicious" spots in his right lung and something strange on one of his ribs. Next step, bone scans and more tests. In late July the diagnosis came back: Small Cell Lung Cancer - Stage IV, metastasized to left thigh, ribs, spine, left hip and skull, inoperable, 9 months maximum life expectancy. This time my mother took care of everything. Things that no one wants to do. I could not be there this time. I could not help very much at all.

I currently live 600 miles from my parents. It takes between 10 & 11 hours to get there by automobile. My father died on August 31^st at 8:45pm. I was somewhere in the middle of central Illinois, trying like mad to get there. I pulled into their driveway just before midnight. They had already taken my father’s body away. My mother fought with them trying to get them to wait for me. But the law required the hospice workers to remove his body from the home immediately.

For me, one of the hardest things about his death was that I waited until noon, because of some stupid meeting at work, to leave Minnesota and drive down to Indiana.

My daily battle is against the tendency to let that fact swamp me and take precedence over the fact that my family went to visit him as many weekends as we could during June, July and August and had wonderful visits, full of stories, tears and laughter each and every time. I did have some time to be with him with full knowledge that his days were limited and I would not be able to be with him any more.

The days that I can remember that go well.

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Bindi the jungle girl

Okay, I admit it. I was (am) a fan of Steve Irwin the Crocodile Hunter. I know he was a geek, but he was such an entertaining geek. I spent several New Year's Eves watching the 24-hour Crocodile Hunter marathons. Animal Planet and Discovery channel (and maybe the History channel) are the only things I miss about television. Although I thought Project Runway was sort of interesting when I watched it in Las Vegas at my daughter's house.

Anyway, I do not know where Steve Irwin fell on the scale of actually doing good things for the sake of the planet, but he had lots of passion that I do not think was only geared towards making money. I think he was truly moved to work for the welfare of the world and everything in it, particularly animals that most people want to exterminate.

Maybe I am naive, but I liked watching him blunder about in his all-out, wild disdain-for-pain frenzy, finding one more "gorgeous" animal for us to see...

Today I read about his daughter, Bindi. I do not know exactly what I think about her stepping up to the plate in her father's name. I think it is hard for me to disengage the loss of a father with how I react to this story. Thinking about losing a father at such a young age makes me a bit shaky and weepy anyway. It is hard enough when you are 50...

If it is true, as her mother states, that Bindi loves doing this and that if Bindi decided one day that it was not fun any more she would stop doing it, then I think it is okay. Maybe.

Child stars usually make me uncomfortable - or rather the making of child stars makes me uncomfortable. I worry that they do not get the chance to just be kids. Not knowing what goes into all the filming for Bindi's or any other child star's performances, I cannot even begin to evaluate her mother's claims that Bindi is fine, loves what she's doing and all will be well.

The strangest complaint in the NY Times story is the one that people are making about being weirded out by Steve Irwin clips interspersed throughout the show. That does not bother me at all. If my father had left me a legacy, and if I were stepping in to continue it, and if there were film clips of him doing it, you can bet your ass that I would show the clips too.

Do people hold it against the local merchant when they proudly display photographs of the three generations of family who have owned and operated the hardware store? Or use home movies in the television advertisements for those businesses?

Then again, I may just still be enamored of out-and-out audacity of Steve Irwin. Crikey!

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I miss my dad

It is very hard to remember that my father is gone. I keep thinking about things I need to tell him or show him. It is sort of funny, well not really, but I think about telling him things more often now than when he was alive. Used to be, I would go days, if not weeks, without actively thinking about him. Now I think about him all the time.

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4 Weeks

Last night marks four weeks since my father died. I tried not to think about it too much. I am not into avoiding thinking about it, but I do not want to dwell upon it either.

I wonder if Friday nights are always going to make me sad.

I see photographs of my father and I cannot imagine him gone. He is always so damn strong and vibrant and alive in the photographs. How could someone so present in the world be gone?

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Interstices - Part 3

There are two more fiber sculptures in my show. This one is called Glimpses in Time, and it tells the story of my father's life. It is hanging in the north room of the gallery.

Glimpses In Time: We All Tell Stories
Italian burlap, wooden dowel rods
approximately 60 inches x 96 inches x 72 inches
The two small works visible (on pedestals) are also my artwork
and will be featured in a later post. The work on the walls
is by the other artist in the show, Carol Faber.

Working with commercial fabric allows me to take work with me (sometimes, anyway). Abelisto and I went to a fabric wholesale outlet in the Twin Cities and bought 20 yards of this off-white Italian burlap. I experimented with using all sorts of substances to stiffen it enough that it would stand on its own - without luck. After wasting several yards (a pricey experiment - Italian burlap retails for $20/yard and wholesales for $8), I decided that none of that was going to work and I would have to use some really nasty, toxic chemicals to stiffen the fabric sufficiently. I am trying not to use those types of chemicals in my work anymore...

So I took another path, and created a work that would hang from the ceiling.

I started this piece on the trips to Indiana to be with my family during the last summer of my father's life. It has sections where I have pulled out the vertical threads, leaving only the horizontal ones. This creates visibly distinct sections - narrow and wide bands of open, semi-transparent areas.

So how, you ask, does this piece represent my father's life (and recent death)?

I took this piece with me when we first went to Indiana after learning that my father had terminal lung cancer, and each of the subsequent times we visited this past summer. During the days we spent there I worked on the piece on my mother's huge dining room table in the great room of my parents' house, the room where my father's hospital bed was set up. People would come and go - my brothers and sister, my aunt, the neighbors, friends of my father and mother, the hospice nurses. We we all told stories, lots of stories. The stories soaked into the artwork, the lines of thread being drawn out were the words of the stories, the gaps left behind were the feelings left when the stories were finished. The columns of drawn threads, narrow and wide, sometimes close together, sometimes farther apart, represent all of the lives that touched my father's.

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Home Again

We are back home now. We made fairly good time coming back - left around 8:30 (our time) and got to Winona around 6:30.

I only got sad once during the drive back.

It is impossible to believe that my father is gone. It does not feel real yet... I am not sure it ever will.

I miss him. Now and forever.

A very hard day...

We had a visitation and memorial service for my father today.

I made a video for the visitation. We scrambled for photographs, searching my mother and sister's numerous photograph albums, bought a scanner (my mother's had quit working ages ago), and I scanned about 30 photographs, color corrected and optimized them in Photoshop. I did not overly repair them. I wanted people to see the age of the photos - I just made the colors and contrast a bit better if the photograph was too faded. The wear and tear of old photographs is a big part of the story that each of them tells, to make them too pretty would be akin to telling a false story and I wanted to tell my father's story right and true. We found two of my father's cds - a jazz one and a classical one. I took one track off of each of them and imported all of it into Premiere, added timings, transitions and a title slide and rendered the whole thing through Encore to make a DVD that was set up to loop the movie over and over.

At the visitation people seemed to really enjoy the movie. They sat there smiling through their tears, telling stories about my father.

I mentioned before that he did not want to be displayed at a funeral. He did not want people looking at his body and "carrying on." I think I agree with the idea of being cremated. It was a very peaceful ceremony, and I am not sure it would have been so restful if there had been a body to cry over. I do not know, hopefully no one will be stuck without a way to heal because they did not see a body. The body is not the person. And cremation is what my father wanted. My mother did not agree, but she said she would do it for him. She said she did not want to be haunted. I am not quite sure if she meant that literally or not... she is a Celt after all.

Two ministers spoke, even though my father was not a church goer. One minister was the one from my mother's church. He is new (and very young - not actually a full minister yet, I think), and did not know my father well. He came over once during the last few weeks of my father's life and spoke with him. Even though he did not know my father well, he did very well presiding over the memorial service. The other minister was a friend of my father. He was one of my father's McDonalds breakfast compadres. He had a personal relationship with my father, and was able to speak about him directly.

After they both spoke the presiding minister asked if anyone else wanted to speak. I did not have anything prepared, but I could not let go of the tightness in my chest without speaking about my father. I spoke about his kindness and generosity, about the stories he told us, the stories he created just by living a true life. Actually I am not sure exactly what I said. I did not break down, but I got a bit weepy at the very end. My sister and mother and one brother thanked me for speaking, the other brother looked me in the eye and nodded. I took that as his approval.

After the service we went to a luncheon that my mother's church had prepared for us. Everyone at the service was invited, but only family and the church people came to the luncheon. We thought it was going to be a chore, but it was not. It was a very relaxed and peaceful meal.