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there’s the immediate family, for Dad’s Zoom wake. (Upper left is me and Farmsister’s family, beneath us is Mom and Middle-Little.)
it went pretty well. my one cousin hasn’t got her covid test results back. The other cousin who probably gave it to her didn’t attend. Everyone else is dad’s siblings, one of dad’s cousins, and their children.
ArmySister’s son showed off the table he’s making with the supplies he foraged in Grandpa’s barn at Thanksgiving, with the welder Grandma and Grandpa bought him for his birthday, and the skills Grandpa taught him at Thanksgiving.
I managed to speak without sobbing. I hadn’t prepared remarks, but I talked about how all the condolence cards all said “such a quiet man” etc., and how that wasn’t really what he was– but of course, my mom had already said that, as had my older sister. So I talked about something else nobody had previously mentioned, not even the obituary– his love of reading. Of course both my parents are big readers, but I felt that his love of reading had gone along with his overall excellet imagination, and had fueled his seeming knowledge of everything, and his ability to solve real-world problems by dint of always being willing to come at them from a new angle. Most people hadn’t noticed, but he’d been quietly delighted upon finally adopting smartphone technology and realizing that meant you had constant access to the entire library. He spent a lot of hours reading novels on his phone!
IDK how well it went over but that doesn’t really matter; Farmsister followed it up with a story of how just a couple of weeks ago the chair in her house that everyone sits in in the kitchen broke and her first thought was “better call Dad” and of course he’d have been happy to fix it for her, but then she reconsidered, and said “I bet I can come up with a way to fix it,” and she did, she finished it last night, and she thought that would have pleased him even more. “And in true John Kelly style,” she added, “I over fixed it, so it will never break again, at least not in that fashion.”
ArmySister had a wonderful bit she and her kids had co-written, but she also thanked Dad for the gift of incredible two-inch-long eyebrow hairs, which then one of the closer cousins later chimed in and said her son had inherited, and his whole life she’s been like “Cal you have Uncle John’s eyebrows and there is nothing we can do”.
After the wake Mom and M-L came over to the farmhouse and we had a birthday dinner for Dave. I’d made scalloped potatoes, which was time-consuming but FS had the idea of running the potatoes through her food processor’s slicer attachment. I don’t have one of those but God I wish I did! It helped a lot. I food-processed the onions too, to a fine paste, which was fantastic. The color wasn’t great of the finished item and it could have been creamier but the flavor was very good.
We were toasting with Laphroaig whiskey, which was Dad’s favorite. It goes down much more easily than when I was a child trying to understand what Dad drank. I’ll have to buy a bottle to keep on hand. I also discovered that after a couple of ounces of that neat my mood was much elevated, so while having a birthday party just after a wake doesn’t sound like it’d be very cheerful, it turned out all right.
Ah, I’m really not ready at all to move on, but I think this marks the passage from the acute phase to the less-so and we have to get somewhat about the business of getting on with life.
Mom said, “Since New Year’s is a holiday, I get the day off from dealing with anything at all,” and seemed pleased, and we agreed, and then Farmsister immediately recruited her to come over today and help us arrange dried flowers. BUT, at least, she promised we don’t have to work in the unheated barn attic– we’ll haul the flowers down and work around the dining room table instead, which is a little extra work but incredibly more pleasant, and then we can all do it together in decent light and probably get quite a lot done. Mom was happy enough to do that– it’s not that she wants to do nothing, it’s that she’s free from trying to deal with any business matters, since nothing is open.
It’s hard to know when to leave her to herself and when to keep her company, but she’ll let us know. BIL spent yesterday morning at her house trying to fix Dad’s last incomplete repair job, which he didn’t have quite all the parts to do; he requested that she get a whiteboard that she hang up, and she can write the things she needs done, and he can write the times he’s available. She thought that was rather a good system.
I am really glad Farmsister married a good dude who knows how to fix stuff. That does help a lot. I wish I knew how to fix stuff too. I may set about attempting to improve my handyman skills, which are shamefully bad. (Your picture was not posted)
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