Mostly funereal

[ciroccoj]

First off, thanks so much to all of you, for your comments and stuff re. Guy. I haven't been online long enough to reply to anybody, but it's helped. Thanks, guys.

So, the funeral was on Friday, in Thurso. Dreary rainy day, and a 45-minute drive that got stretched into almost 1.5 hour drive due to me getting lost in the rain. So I didn't get to the church in time to hear the eulogy, read by Guy's granddaughter Annie and his daughter-in-law Lynne. My friend Karolyn, who did manage to get there on time, said it was lovely - and mentioned my mom, too. I've asked Guylaine for a copy.

So weird, driving into Thurso. I haven't gone since my mom died, but we used to go a few times during the summer, on the way to Guy's cottage. The pulp & paper factory where Guy worked for about 45 years stinks to high heaven, but I got a warm feeling driving past it. When Guy retired, his co-workers, instead of giving him a watch or a plaque or something, gave him a wooden model of the entire factory, to commemorate the fact that Guy had been part of just about every single department and section of the place.

The factory's also the reason Guy met my mom. Percy, the owner of the company that held the air-quality equipment contract at the factory, was married to my mom's best friend Shirley. My mom and Guy ended up being invited to dinner at their place a number of times, and eventually got to know each other and then started dating. And Guy apparently told my mom, when they started, "I been working at de same factory for forty years and I was married to de same woman for forty years, so if you go out wit me, you can't get rid of me real quick, 'cause I stay till de end." And he did.

The factory even had something to do with Daniel. As part of upper management, Guy went to the Canadian Pulp and Paper Association (CPPA) meeting every winter in Montreal, and the year I was pregnant with Daniel, he took my mother. It was sort of her introduction to his work buddies, as they'd only been going out for a short while. Everyone was very happy that Guy was finally dating somebody, after the death of his wife, and very interested in meeting this Chilean lady that Guy had taken up with, so they were all very nice, very welcoming. That night I went into labour and my mom drove to Kingston to see me. The next day his work buddies were startled to see Guy by himself again.

"What happened to Julia?" they asked.

"She 'ad a baby, so I sent 'er away," he said, and laughed until they finally got the story out of him. For years, Daniel was known as "the CPPA kid."

Anyway. Funeral. It was in French, which Justin' doesn't understand terribly well, but I translated as much as I could. It was also very Catholic, so I explained as much as I could about that as well. (Aside: Funny how Chris, raised Christian, rebelled against his Christian upbringing and is now sort of secularly Buddhist, and Justin, who is being raised sort of mildly secularly Buddhist, is very interested in Christianity.) Happily, I was able to translate without bugging people much, as Karolyn had very cleverly discovered an upstairs balcony. The only problem was, Justin wanted Chris and Daniel to look up. We're damn lucky he didn't throw a shoe down at them during Communion.

Cutest moment:
Justin: There's a lot of people here.
Me: A whole church full, yeah.
Justin: That's a lot of people who loved Guy.
Me: Yeah.
Justin: How did he get so many people to love him?

Then after the funeral, we went to a Legion place for the reception. Mountains and mountains of wonderful food. Three men who looked eerily like Guy - his sons Luc and Pierre, and his brother Raymond. Spooky. Met a lady who was a friend of my mom's, and had the same shoe size. And inherited her shoes. She was wearing a pair that day, she said, "With pride" :)

Ended up getting home in time to go to swimming class. Had a wonderful time with a bunch of the other moms, destressing and talking about nothing having to do with funerals at all. Actually, what we talked about should probably be its own entry - had to do with how much we need to get together with other parents, who can reassure us that we're not completely screwing up as parents in general, let alone as home schoolers.

Actually, there's a whole lot else I could write about, about going through Guy's house with Guylaine and putting stickies on all of Guy's things, which she'll have carted off over Easter Weekend, and about how Daniel and Justin are doing with all of this, and about finishing my Law Review edit, and about the countdown to Chris' first exam is 2 days and his final is 14 days, and about how my final is in 13 days, and... yeah. Instead, I'm going to try to clean up my house. It's become a complete pit over the last two weeks. I'm half-tempted to get visual evidence, to make myself feel better after I clean it. I might also post it, for other people's use whenever they start to feel down about their own living space. mynuet? I could e-mail you copies for you to slip under your neighbour-from-hell's door, with "So there!" scrawled on the back. ;)

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I don't know if I posted when Guy passed on, but you've certainly been in my thoughts since then. I'm glad to hear that the funeral had its good moments, and that your memories are warm and loving.

Katie (Poppins' sister)

[umbo.livejournal.com]

*more hugs*