![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
via https://ift.tt/2Yc0dsf
Friday was one of those autumn days we get around here where the sky is like enormously blue and strewn with very dramatic high clouds. It started quite cold but the unrelenting sun had teeth, and it wound up being quite pleasant outside.
cut for long story of dad’s interment ceremony and the post-party
We got the whole family into two minivans. I rode with Dad’s urn next to me, and had my arm around it the whole way up. We got to the cemetery and there was a procession of cars there led by a fire truck with flashing lights, so like– super definitely not there for my dad. It’s a national cemetery, they have 15-minute slots for services, it’s very tight. So we went around the block, which out in the country like that is quite a distance, and as we came back– well, our start time was 11, and Mom had been told we could start lining up at 10:45, so we told people to come at 10:45, and everyone, including my sister, mentally made a note to get there at 10:30, so anyway– two carloads of people from our funeral ended up just fully attending the previous funeral because they didn’t know what else to do. I hope Fire Truck Guy’s family wasn’t too confused.
We had quite a huge turnout, because we hadn’t had a funeral at all, this was the only service. Usually few people come to the interment at the cemetery, but this was it, so. We packed the place. Most of the socializing we did was beforehand, since everyone was early.
I hadn’t seen older sister’s new eagle insignia yet. She and her husband of course wore their dress uniforms. Normally funerals are performed at this cemetery by an honor guard of volunteers, but in the case of Dad and any other retired or active military members, the Army sends staff directly to do it, and so the Army had sent a half-dozen people to do this ceremony. Technically one ought to notify them when someone of my sister’s rank is attending, but she had told us not to.
So when my brother-in-law, still a Lt. Col., got out of the car, the one Army corporal’s eyes quietly bugged out, and he could see my sister’s uniform around the car and she noticed him very discreetly craning his neck trying to figure out what she was, and being mildly dismayed to discover she was even higher-ranked.
Not that it mattered. They do the same funeral for everyone.
It mostly consisted of two to three dudes unfolding and then re-folding an American flag with intense eye contact and ritualized caresses of the flag, it’s very odd. On the way home Mom looked up on her phone just what in heck all of that was about, and like okay, the first fold means this, the second signifies that, most of it is reasonable except by like number eleven it’s off the rails into “the lower half of the Seal of Jerusalem” and suchlike, and it winds up with a meditation on George Washington and John Paul Jones, so like– okay whoa, as is true of a great many US Military things.
Anyway they fired a three-volley salute and collected all the shell casings and gave them to us in a plastic baggie so now that’s a thing that we have. Possibly we should put them in with the flag, which is in a wooden and glass case.
After the funeral, we were shooed out so the next service could begin, and then we had just the family and a few select from-long-distance friends come back to the house, and then the fun began. Of Dad’s siblings, only one attended– the brother has the crazy wife who hasn’t let him see any of us for 30 years now really, but his two daughters came with their husbands and children and were rather the life of the party, as ever. (We got a photo of us, the six Kelly girls, four of whom have different last names now, but you can’t really take that away.) And of Dad’s three sisters, one lives in Norway and coudln’t figure out the travel logistics with Covid and her own decreasing ability to get about on her own, and the other had radiation for throat cancer a few years ago and complications from that have taken her ability to speak; she’s just not well enough to travel. Her daughters didn’t come either but they seldom make it to family stuff either.
But Army BIL had come prepared for a Family Event; he had recently purchased a 4-wheel-drive pickup and a double-axle trailer for it, and so he loaded all the children onto this trailer and they drove out the back lane to the field behind the house. For 43 years Mom has owned the right-of-way to this field, and has had a handshake agreement with the farmer whose field it is that she doesn’t mind him using that field, and in return he doesn’t care if we’re in that field whenever we want. They’d already harvested sweet corn and pumpkins from it, and had begun to plow under the remnants in the other half of the field, so Mom felt no compunction about letting all the kids, the second cousins and first cousins and whatnot, just– pick stuff.
We know fine well that of the five-to-nine-year-old crowd that attended this event, most of them will only remember the pumpkin picking. One of my cousins’ twin six-year-olds was so serious about picking corn he got like two dozen ears of it. He knew exactly what it was and that he liked to eat it, and he just focused and took what he wanted. They’ll really eat it, so there’s no harm in it.
Anyway– everyone amassed piles of vegetabley loot, which was adorable.
“Everyone should have funerals before they die,” Farmsister said a little mistily, looking around at the shenanigans.
Dad’s cousin told me several of his friends had done so, and if I ever get a terminal diagnosis I agree with him that it’s a fantastic idea. But we didn’t have that kind of notice here, so. Alas.
I had wanted to collect walnuts with the kids– I’d suggested it as an alternative, if the pumpkins had been plowed in already– but what actually happened was that one of my Army sister’s kids turned up with a handful of walnuts, I said “Oh I wanted to collect some more of those to plant some in memory of Dad”, and Mom found a big plastic bag and Army sister’s two younger kids filled it entirely in like five minutes. So I have like. I have like 50 walnut trees to plant I guess. I was going to do some in pots to start properly but I also might just– take and bury two or three nuts per hole in a few places today, and mark the locations to see if I can’t get them to sprout. Dad just really liked black walnut trees, and planted them everywhere he could, and I’d like to put in a grove of them and maybe get a bench and a plaque and have a spot on the farm where people could come and think of Dad. The national cemetery is nice and will always be cared for, unlike the Catholic cemetery, but it’s also very sterile and really not friendly to visitors. I’d rather have a cenotaph somewhere I could visit frequently and casually.
So maybe that’ll be a side project today– finding a spot, with some input from everyone– but the main project of today (saturday, i’m writing this before dawn) will be a coordinated effort to get the rafters up on the cabin, so that it can have a tarp put over it for winter and be safe there.
I rather expected I’d be a sobbing wreck for much of yesterday, but I only really cried during Taps and only then because Farmsister was crying and using her daughter’s hoodie as a handkerchief because Farmkid was in her lap and she didn’t have a hand free to wipe her eyes. It was too cute and sad.
Imagine being the guy whose job it is to play Taps while everyone cries.
Dad actually was in charge of coordinating the honor guard funerals during his division’s deployment to Iraq in ‘06. It was sort of exhausting, but fortunately his unit didn’t see that many casualties– a couple, mostly from traffic accidents and the like. Army sister’s deployment at the same time was a lot rougher.
anyway. it was lovely to see people. it was touching to see who turned up. it was wildly entertaining as usual to be reunited with the closest of the first cousins.
And I noticed that Army sister has what look like three gray hairs, and when I pointed this out she looked at her children and said ‘Aww! one apiece!’
After everything had been cleaned up, we went out and did the thing that was the real reason ABIL had bought a trailer to go with his truck: loaded up the Jeepster, which had been Army Sister’s first car. It’s a ‘67 Jeepster Commando, school bus yellow except where the paint’s peeling to reveal the original fire truck red. Very subtle car.
Farm BIL hadn’t gotten the memo to pack play clothes, so he came out in his suit and dress shoes to oversee this process. ABIL was quite frank that he has no idea how to back up a trailer, so to start with FBIL did that, and then he explained how to hook up the come-along and how best to angle it, and then ABIL did all the work but FBIL kept doing the troubleshooting. He and Farmsister work very well together, having spent a lot of time doing difficult physical tasks together, so they’d set things up and she’d make adjustments for him while he pointed at things, and then he’d hop off and let ABIL go back to doing the work, because he was in his suit coat and dress shoes and all. Anyway– we got the Jeepster up onto the trailer, and then FBIL was like “so i only just realized this but of course for load-balancing purposes we should’ve faced it the other way, let’s see if having the engine near the tongue of the trailer is too heavy, what’s your balancer look like” and then taught ABIL how to tell if a trailer is too unevenly loaded, which he had not known anything about. So it was useful all around, I think. And then they discussed how best to tie it down.
My oldest nephew was having a lovely time through all of this, getting to steer the car; very likely it will be a project of his and his mother’s, to restore it, and if it doesn’t wind up driveable, well then they’ll sell it or something, but at the least it’s something they can think about for now.
well that’s certainly a long enough post for now, whoops. (Your picture was not posted)
