the week that was
Friday
I'm not exactly sure of the sequence of events. My regular cell phone battery had died (because I hadn't unpacked the charger since Capricon) and I'd left the US phone at home, so I didn't find out until we got home from dinner. mvt saw calls from both John and Paul on the land line, so she knew there was a problem. marahsk and I had dropped Merle off and were planning to get to a movie, but it was after 10:30. There wasn't anything worth watching at Yonge & Dundas or at the Queensway, and I didn't feel like paying $20 for parking at the "Scotiabank" Theater (that everyone in fandom still calls the Paramount), so we just came back to the house when Merle told me to call.
Dad called the neighbor, Frank, when he fell. Frank called paramedics. Dad was lucid and not particularly in pain, he just couldn't get up. Then Dad had a moment of distress, less than a minute, and he passed out. The emergency responders took Dad to the DeGraaf Hospital in North Tonawanda. They proclaimed him deceased about half an hour after he got there, I think just as we hit the road.
I talked to Paul, and then I talked to John. Merle and I threw clothes in suitcases in about ten minutes (I brought some dirty clothes in a plastic garbage bag) and we went. I was still half-packed from Capricon, so that part was relatively easy. We picked up Marah's clothes at her house along the way. We got to Dad's house in Wheatfield well after midnight, but John and Sharon were still there. I got such details as they had. Merle and I slept in Mom's room, Marah in Dad's room.
Saturday
We went to Debbie's on the Boulevard for breakfast. I had set the alarm, but I didn't realize that I wasn't supposed to use the front door; Dad always used the garage because he couldn't manage the porch steps. So I set off the alarm and took the call from the security company. John and Sharon met us at the house afterwards. Sharon organized most of the arrangements. She knew what to do, since we'd done it all last year. Jennie came in the afternoon, and Johnny came for a little while in the evening. We hit Wegman's in the afternoon. Merle made dinner. We picked photographs for the DVD. Marah and Sharon used my computer because I had all the photos from Mom and Dad's computers from the year before. Sharon had a bunch of her family photos as well (actual photographs, not JPEGs).
Sunday
At 9:00 AM we had a meeting at the funeral home. We decide to postpone the funeral until Friday. Uwe had left for Germany on Friday evening to visit his family; he had planned to visit for two weeks, but he was cutting his trip short. We couldn't do the funeral later than Friday; aside from practical complications, Sharon's family had a commitment on Saturday. I think Brittney was having a confirmation or something. Other than that, Dad had made all the arrangements. He did the same things Mom had done, right down to the same prayer on the prayer cards. We paid for an extra day for the death notice, because of the delay, and we had to pay for the DVD, but otherwise it was all covered. After that, John and Sharon had to go. Johnny had a hockey game that day somewhere far to the east, maybe Canandaigua. (Johnny's team won, and he got a goal and an assist.) So it was just the three of us on Sunday. I don't know where the day went. We went to Wegman's again and got more supplies.
Monday
Monday was a quiet day. Even a week later, I'm hazy on details and sequence of events, so I could have days wrong. Monday was the day nothing would be happening, so I thought about going back to Toronto to work that day, but I just wasn't up to concentrating. I missed a bunch of meetings that week. I called the security company to set a non-zero delay for opening the front door. I think it was Monday that the girls went to Avenue to buy clothes. I had try to get them going in the morning, but it was after 2 PM when they left, so it was like 5 PM when they got back. By the time we had lunch, it was too late for me to go shopping.
Tuesday
We ran a bunch of errands. I think it was that morning that Sharon and Merle went to organize the flowers. I don't remember where the afternoon went. I managed to get to the Casual Male before they closed. I spent US$400 in twenty minutes; I think we kept the staff a couple minutes late but they were still very nice and helpful. After that I think we split up; Merle needed something, maybe socks? Marah went to the bookstore and I went to Best Buy. I bought The Sims 2 Apartment Life. I know we got to Anderson's a couple of times over these days. Except for the funeral home, every place we went was on the Boulevard, because that's where everything was.
Wednesday
Paul and Uwe made it in on Wednesday around 2 PM. It was unseasonably warm, around 50°F. On the previous Friday, I had grabbed my heavy down winter coat and the short leather Buffalo State jacket that cmzhang had given me. Marah was wearing the Canada jacket that Chris had given her, but it was torn and Merle no longer approved of it. The amusing part here is that Jennie used to work part-time at the Buffalo State bookstore (her aunt Lynn, Sharon's sister, manages the place) where they sold those jackets, so she was surprised when she saw me wear it the first time. Anyway, the Buffalo State thing was never really me (I went to UB for a year in the dawn of time), so I gave her my jacket. I needed a new one. We got to Dick's but ran out of time, so we went back to the house; we were en route back to Wheatfield when Merle called to ask where I was. Merle went to the funeral home with Paul and Uwe while I was changing into the clothes I'd bought the evening before. I wore one of Dad's ties. We grabbed McDonald's drive-through on the way, as I knew the next five hours would not involve food; still, we were only a minute late; we got there before John and Sharon did. It wasn't until 3:15 that the funeral director managed to herd us into the viewing room. Lacking my experience, Johnny had managed to not eat; we sent him out to get fast food. He was back in plenty of time.
Some of the neighbors showed up right at 4:00. Sharon's parents, Barb and Jim, got there shortly after, and they stayed the whole time. My cousin Gary from Buffalo, and his wife Diane, were there. Mostly it was a bad week for my family. Amanda and Monica had other commitments, Bud couldn't make arrangements so he couldn't leave Florida, the east coast snowstorm bogged down Helene and Ia, Tessie had just moved to Florida, etc. Frank, the neighbor, was there. Many of the Kluges came during the evening. Even though the viewing room was almost empty from 5:30 to 6:00 or so except for the immediate family, it got a lot busier by 7:00 PM. We watched the DVD a lot. As I had the year before, I explained the photos in the DVD, since I was the only person who really knew who was in all the pictures and when and where they were taken. We had the usual corporate flowers: Verizon, Xerox, and Ford all sent arrangements. The neighbors sent an arrangement, and Matthew and his partner Vince (who wasn't here) also sint a nice arrangement that Merle liked.
We went back to the house afterwards. "We" included our family and several of the Kluges, and I think Gary, and of course Frank. Frank's wife Amy came in for a minute. We brought a lot of food. Marah and I picked up three large pizzas (sausage on one, pepperoni on the second, just cheese on the third) from Just Pizza on the Boulevard, and Sharon went to Wegman's to pick up sub and fruit trays. The alarm had gone off just before we got there, we don't know why, so no one took the security call. Niagara County police showed up as we were just getting settled. Somehow people in suits and nice clothes carrying trays of food and boxes of pizza didn't fit the burglar profile, so the police were satisfied and went away.
We talked for hours. I think it was Wednesday night that we helped Jennie with a school project. (Actually, I didn't help, but Paul, Uwe, Merle, Marah, Sharon, and John did.) She was making little loot bags for her students in the class she's been a teaching assistant at, so she made everybody help her. Marah commented it was like putting together registration bags for a convention. Sharon said Jennie spent all her spare cash on her students. We talked about Jennie's school. Something about how she's the first person at Canisius to combine an education program with a music concentration, so they had to make up some details for her as she went along, and apparently there was some minor disagreement between the dean of her program and the dean of records about what was required from her. Most people left around 11:30, and John's family shortly thereafter. I stayed up talking to Marah and Merle for a while. Paul and Uwe stayed in Dad's room, and Marah slept on the pull-out couch in the living room.
Thursday
In the morning, I had leftover pizza for breakfast. We went to see the lawyer at 11:00. Some of it was the same as last year; we knew what was in the will. Some of it was easier; Dad had organized some arrangements to simplify probate. In other ways it was more complicated, as the details actually related to us directly this time. We were there for more than an hour. Dad had already passed the house to us in October as a living trust, and we were beneficiaries of the main retirement account, so the important assets skip probate and come to us directly. Paul had assembled a list of the main assets. John and I signed a couple of papers; Paul, as executor, signed more.
Dad has recently gotten into coin collecting, which is to say he had this ridiculous collection of overpackaged stuff that will surely not be worth to us what he paid for it. The whole coin-collecting industry strikes me as an elaborate scam, but whatever. I know Dad liked them because he was interested in history. When I was a kid, he got me started on a penny collection, though gods know what happened to that. We have moved the coins to a more secure location.
After the lawyer, we went to the house. Paul suggested that we pick a bank to pay household accounts, as the house is not part of the estate, it just belongs to us now. We picked a bank on the Boulevard because the location is relatively convenient. We sat through opening an account, which soaked up another half hour or so. The bank's computers were briefly confused at me having a home address in a different country, but the bank assistant manager called their IT people for help and figured it out. Marah met me in the bank parking lot and we went to Dick's. I found a nice light spring jacket that is very warm and dry. It came with rain pants, which I strongly suspect I will never wear. (ann_totusek called me while I was in the fitting room. I told her "I'm wearing rubber pants right now.")
Back to the house, changed, back to the funeral home for the second day of viewing. The first part of the day was quieter than the day before. One of my mother's work colleagues from ECC came; he had missed her funeral last year. My cousin Matthew came in from Virginia. (He's no longer working on the cruise ship in Hawaii; he has some sort of maritime consulting job now.) Amanda's husband Eric came as well, which was nice, so Matthew and Eric represented the McKeon side of my family. I had not finished the eulogy, so I was working on it there on my laptop. Even more Kluges showed up than the day before; Barb and Jim were there for the whole time. I think a couple of them were Jennie's school friends. Jennie's cousin Jessica spookily resembles weirdchic862; same height, build, hair, age, clothing style, voice tone, and similar face. Merle and Marah noticed the strong resemblance. I commented that Jessica's hand gestures were less exaggerated than Megan's; Jessica said "In a funeral home, yeah." The funeral home staff (who were mostly related to each other) were driven a bit crazy; there were four other funerals with viewings. (We parked on the west side; whoever parked in front had paid for the powder-blue limousine convoy, ooh la. I can't believe I have opinions about this stuff.) By 7:30, a huge mob of Kluges had shown up. Tracy is pregnant and she has a little kid too. Pregnant women and little kids are always welcome at funerals, IMO, even if the kids make noise. There was a short service led by the church people just before 8:00 PM.
A bunch of us went back to the house again on Thursday evening, including a larger number of Kluges. Some cousin of Sharon's who I don't know was standing in my mother's kitchen regaling a couple other others about some deer-hunting expedition, in excrutiating detail about the mechanics of hunting. My mother would not have approved. We had pizza and subs again, and salads and so on. Sharon had made a comment about not really liking the pizza the night before, so I ordered more interesting choices: pineapple and pepperoni on one, the way Sharon likes it; sausage, chicken, and garlic on the second, the way I like it, and peppers, onions, and mushrooms on the third, for the vegetarians. These were all popular choices (though as usual the veggie went slowest). People left around midnight.
Marah's husband Andre, my housemate Cheryl, and yourpeter came into town after midnight; they just went straight to the Scottish Inn (which is really a horrible dive, but it's close and has free wifi). Cheryl had a thing on Thursday evening so they didn't leave Toronto until well after 9 PM. Marah went to sleep at the hotel on Thursday evening.
All through the week, there was quite a lot of mourning, which included a fair degree of emotional drama from many people, including myself. The first couple of days, I was in a noticeably bad mood. After that, I spent a lot of time dealing with everyone else's issues. Actually, my brothers and I were generally okay, which is to say we did our usual thing and didn't express our feelings in anybody else's earshot. Having Jennie around was helpful; even when she was sad, she managed to project positive and soothing feelings a lot of the time.
Friday
Catholic funerals are long. Friday morning, Paul drove Uwe, Merle, and I to the funeral home for 8:45 AM. There was a short service for people there: a hymn and a couple of prayers. The funeral home staff held us back for a minute; there was another funeral going out at the same time (with the powder-blue limousines), and they didn't want our people going to the wrong church. Then we carried the coffin to the hearse. The pallbearers were me and my brothers, Johnny, Jim, and Frank. Someone had given the funeral home odd instructions, as for some reason we were in the fourth car, but Frank waved us ahead of him as we left the parking lot.
At the church, St. Andrew's on Sheridan, the crowd wasn't quite as big as last year, but it was almost as big. Matthew was there, with his uncle John McKeon (my mother's cousin, who happened to be in town that day). Neighbors and other friends of my parents, my friends, a mob of Kluges and a few of their friends, maybe sixty people or so altogether, I'm not sure. Sharon had arranged for Father Mack, who did the funeral last year for Mom, to do Dad's as well. Dad had not worked since Reagan was president, so the only person there from his workplace was Marah, but that's another story. Sharon's sister Lynn did the first reading, Jim did the second, and Frank did the third. The priest gave a long sermon. Jennie was a eucharistic minister, so most people went to her. I gave the eulogy; I modified a few bits as I was reading it. They took the cloth off the casket and put the flag over it. The mass ended just before 11 AM. We carried the casket back to the hearse and got back in our cars.
From St. Andrew's, we drove to Mount Olivet Cemetary on Delaware. (Marah's father is buried across the road in Elmlawn.) We went to the mausoleum (the new one). Construction planned last year was completed now, so the crypt was now just inside the new doors. Another short-ish ceremony. The soldiers played Taps. Then they folded the flag and gave it to John "with the thanks of a grateful nation". The two soldiers were just kids, barely more than Jennie's age. I guess I would have rather the flag be presented to me, but my Dad would never have complained about something like that, so I didn't either. A few more prayers, we put roses on the coffin, and that was it. Sharon had me hold the flag for a minute as we got outside. Ultimately I'd want it to end up with Johnny anyway.
After that, we went to the Holiday Inn on the Boulevard; they had us in the Ontario room, same as last year. My recollection was that the food was very good. I sat with Merle and my friends, Paul sat with Uwe and our relatives (Matthew and John McKeon), John sat with Sharon and her family, Jennie had some of her friends at another table, and we all circulated a bit. I was going to go back for seconds, but they had taken the plates away, which was annoying because there was a lot left. During the week, Paul had found Dad's wallet, and Merle found two stashes of cash, one at Mom's desk and one somewhere else, that must have been sitting there for a year.
After brunch, my friends came back to the house, along with Paul and Uwe. I decided I wanted to not be around this whole situation for a couple of days, so I had gotten on Expedia a few days earlier and booked a flight to Chicago for Friday evening. So all I did Friday afternoon was talk to people and pack; I had to do a bit of laundry too. Then I hugged everyone goodbye and Marah drove me to the airport. Everybody else left in their various cars after I was gone.