Wow

I've stayed up most of the night, geeking around on the web, reading The Secret Diaries of Cassandra Claire (LOTR humour), mostly just coming down from the stress of the funeral and all of that. And it's 5:33 am, and I look out the window and see a beautiful mauve colour in the sky, and everything all still and dawnish. Birds chirping, the world waking up. A soft breeze through the trees. It's beautiful out there.

Eulogy

I think I'll be updating sporadically as I try to process the whole funeral experience. The bare bones of it is that it involved a lot of smiling and nodding and hugging and thanking, and some crying, and endless reams of people I mostly didn't know (a lot more than I expected, too), and being on the spot for most of the night as one of the two main mourners, all of which sounds awful.

And it was, in a way. But it was also tremendously healing, and I don't really know why yet. Other than the usual trite platitudes like "it's a rite of passage" and "the community coming together helps the process of grief" and "rituals provide comfort" and all of that stuff that you could probably find in any two-page funeral home pamphlet called Mourning and You.

Probably because they're all true, to a certain extent. And there's a reason why we have these rather morbid things called funerals, other than blind masochism. Because they do help.

Anyway. For anyone interested, here's the ( eulogy read by Chris )