The Funeral

Well, she died. I suppose I should be singing "Ding Dong, the Witch is Dead". I don't have the heart. Dad loved her (in my cynical mind, for all the wrong reasons). Her two sons are great guys.

There were five of us at the graveside service. Don and Fred, her sons, Diane, Fred's wife, Dad, and me. The service was kind of "out of the box" generic Protestant, with nothing to show that it was Presbyterian. We were all standing up. After the preacher was done talking, Fred put her ashes in a little hole in the ground next to a fountain. He tried to get Dad to help; Dad can't bend over too well after the hip replacement. Don took a video; he doesn't think it will come out because of the lighting. I thought the lighting was fine but I have never done videos. Don is a pro.

At some point, they will plant roses around the fountain.

She was loud, bossy, opinionated, ignorant, and bigoted. The last time I talked to her, she did her anti-Italian rant to my Italian wife. I dropped the ball -- I'm so used to being ranted at, cursed, and insulted that it just bounces off of me. My wife doesn't have that kind of crust. I simply didn't pick up on what was happening. After all, isn't that what everybody's elderly relatives do? Tell you how you are the scum of the Earth and deserve to be taken out and shot?

I brought up my wife's ancestry in conversation. From the looks on faces, apparently they had never picked up on this -- even though I'm sure I explained why my wife's family has three different last names. They could have asked before this. Nobody cared enough to ask why we were upset.

The Fisher King, the Guardian of the Holy Grail, was wounded by a spear through the thighs (PG version) or testicles (real version). He can only be free from the pain when a visitor to the Grail Castle asks the cause of his distress.

My father cannot bear to utter the words "I don't know" or "I was wrong". But why is it that hard to ask "what's wrong"?