7/1/06 - June 21st is Dead to Me.
It was on June 21, 2005 that my father died.
It was on June 21, 2006 that my grandfather, his father, died.
From here on out, I think I'm going to hunker down in some cozy bunker on June 20th, and just sleep until it's the 22nd.
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His death wasn't entirely unexpected. He had been ailing for years with various minor health problems, but it was the death of my father really broke his spirit. He passed away around 5 AM Eastern time Wednesday morning. A few months prior, he had made arrangements for a one day viewing, then cremation. I wonder if he already had the timing worked out.
The big question for the lady and I the morning after was how we were going to get to Pittsburgh. As I've mentioned before, my entire extended family lives in Pittsburgh. When my father died, we scheduled the viewing three days afterward in part so that everyone who wanted to see him had time to travel. Unfortunately, a good portion of my family didn't feel that we deserved the same courtesy. They wanted Grandpap's viewing on Thursday, which meant we would have had zero chance of attending. After several phone calls and a lot of arm-twisting, we finally got it moved to Friday.
But that still left us just over a day to get from Albuquerque to Pittsburgh on no notice.
My mother had told us previously that, if there was a death in the family while I was in grad school, she would cover our travelling expenses. However, I started looking into flights, and tickets would have been over $800 a person at best, even with obscene numbers of flights and layovers. Bereavement tickets only worked for direct flights, and there were no direct flights from Albuquerque to anywhere useful. I was torn; as much as I wanted to be at the viewing, I didn't feel comfortable spending thousands of dollars on this.
When the lady came home from work Wednesday, I explained the situation, and laid out the best scenarios I could come up with - all of which involved several plane changes, a timely airport pick up, an extended driving trip, and military-precision timing.
The lady pulled up Mapquest, then decided to do me one crazier.
"Let's just drive it."
(This is part of what I love about my wife: I think I have a crazy idea, and then she does me one crazier.
"Let's go to Denver." "How about Vegas?"
"Honeymoon in Ireland?" "Let's go for Malta!"
"Hang-gliding sounds nice." "How about base-jumping without parachutes?"
OK, not the last one. Yet.)
So that's exactly what we did. In twenty minutes, our bags were packed. Despite a rainstorm that extended from OK to PA (and only along our route!), we rolled into Pittsburgh at 1 PM Friday.
I'll write about the viewing another day.
On the way back, we had a little bit more time to spend. We stayed with the lady's 89-year-old granny around Cincinnati and visited with some of her extended family in Nashville. And at that point, we had another choice to make. We were going to be driving through Memphis - should we make our American pilgrimage to Graceland? Neither of us had seen Graceland, we both kind of wanted to, and we never planned on being there again.
I, always a slave to the schedule, thought no.
My lady, always doing me one crazier, thought yes.
So we went to Graceland.
(You may have heard about Bush's visit there with Koizumi recently - the president's henchmen were readying the place during our walk-through.)
We finally got back to Albuquerque on Tuesday. The car, having acquired about 4000 miles in less than 6 days, required an oil change and two new tires.
We both went back to work on Wednesday.
And that's the story of how my grandfather celebrated a terrible anniversary, how we took our craziest roadtrip ever, and how we got to see the home of The King.
The End.