Post Celebration Recap

The celebration for my step-mom Trish went great. All of the friends and family showed a great amount of support. I must admit I don't think I knew more than 30% of the people there. I am sure I met most of them at one point in my life. This is just further proof of how large of an impact Trish had on people lives.

Trish's sister Donna and her friend Ray did a great job with the eulogies and I was told that my sister and I did a good job with the poems Trish chose for us to read, but what affected me most was were the people who spoke during the "open session". These people were willing to speak in front of 150 people while bawling their eyes out. That says as much about how many lives Trish impacted and how deep that impact was. The amazing thing was they basically all said the same things about Trish: "graceful, willlowy, kind, gentle passionate, adventurous, witty". There were some different themes but they all came back to the same general idea. The quantity and quality of what they said will stay with me forever and drive me to continue to be a better person.

There was one exception that I will touch on later in this post. We are still in the positive phase of this post.

I need to give a shout out to my wife. She came down with the flu less than 24 hours prior to the service yet still went. She had a fever of around 102 combined with the well known fact she is a crier she felt more like she had a temperature of 104. Thank you for being there and supporting me. BTW if anyone who went to the service came down with the flu this paragraph will self destruct in 5 seconds.

Slim and family drove the 3 hours each way even though they knew the shelve lives of their young children wouldn't let them see a whole lot of anyone but they wanted to show their support for their family and that was greatly appreciated. Their kids are so cute just having them their was uplifting. Slim's wife according to my Dad is more beautiful than ever. Dad has always been a smooth one. I do not disagree with him though, motherhood has treated her very well. Apparently all fatherhood has done for Slim is give him even more gray hair. He was sharply dressed though and as Slim as ever.

BigFoot (BF) and LittleFoot (LF) were there for the service and the get together at my Dad's house. BTW he is 6' 6" and she is 3' 8" or something like that. Okay so she is actually 4' 11" but still the size difference is staggering yet they fit together as well as any couple I know. They also brought Bob. Surprisingly with that name you would think that is their son but that is the name of their new AussieDoodle puppy. Super cute dog and already being trained very well not that is suprising to anyone who knows BF. I never thought LF would let BF name their dog Bob. Solid work BF. Bob was a hit with Czervik's son and the adults as well. People were a tad concerned when BF kept referring to Bob as having to go to this cage but LF assured them he was referring to crate training. I hope she is right. Having the vertically challenged couple there was great. BF has probably spent more time with Trish than any of the homeys and he lost his father to cancer a little over 10 years ago so he understood more than most what I was going through. Sometimes I have no words for how great my friends are to me!

GrapeApe and his wife were there for everything which was great. They are some of the most laid back and fun people you could ever hang around with. GrapeApe will miss Trish in numerous ways as she was the first adult to push beer on him and unfortunately she also witnessed the WittDaddy choreographed Butt Dance. That is right, these are my friends. They are looking forward to my wife and I moving back to New England and even promised to go camping with us this year. We will see if that happens as this is one extremely busy family with a a couple of kids and their own business. Either way it will be great to see more of them.

One of the most entertaining moments for all of us was why a certain person (Czervik) didn't show up for the service due to...ummm....problems with their driving records and the officer who didn't like him doing 40 in a 25. Enough said. The great part was Czervik, the boy and the fiance all showed up for the gathering afterwards. Czervik is pretty funny and his boy is so cute that he can not help be the life of the party. I mean the boy not you Czervik!

My friends being there was a great tribute to how Trish and my Dad treated them and to how strong our friendships are. I want to thank you all. I need to throw in a mention of our boy in Bradenton. He called to offer his family's support knowing that I would be drinking Geary's which I promptly made sure he knew.

I also got to reunite with my cousin Nate who I probably haven't seen in over 20 years. He is a good guy and lucky for us works in a large bike shop. Can you say discount! Unfortunately he also had a run in with the cops last weekend. He left our house at 3:3o AM to go to the airport. I am fairly sure he stopped drinking when I did which was around 10 PM so that hopefully wasn't an issue. Unfortunately he was caught doing 105 on Interstate 95. The speed limit is only 65 and, well, he doesn't have a current license so he was hauled off to jail. I wonder what Trish thinks about all of this. She definitely drove fast but she was able to stay out of trouble. Maybe 105 is too fast?

My sister was a trooper all weekend. She had to plan a lot of the service as I couldn't do much from Miami and Dad was busy with numerous planning activities. She pulled together a lot of the service items including the 2 co-workers who volunteered to coordinate the food. This was no easy feat as we had friends, family and a restaurant all providing the food. That was an amazing gesture by Luanne and Deirdre. Thank you both so much. My sister not only coordinated the drinks and all service items but also managed to get her friend Derrick to play live music. Trish wanted the Beatle's song "In My Life" to be played at her service and Derrick learned the song just for this one playing. To top this all off my sister had to speak in public. Between getting thrown into a pit of snakes and speaking in public it would a be a tough choice for her but she stood up in front of 150 people and read a poem with all the poise of a seasoned public speaker.

Dad was great. He worked hard to put together what Trish wanted and I know he was pleased with the overall tenor of things. He guessed there would be around 150 people attending and he was pretty accurate. He also gets to fill in for Trish at margarita night so that made him pretty happy. He handled himself very well and I know that he truly misses Trish but with so much going on he had to keep it together and he did. He will be ok. It will not be easy but he is tough and unfortunately has been preparing for this for the last few years.

All in all a great tribute to Trish, except for...the Cousin!

Her cousin was supposed to sing the Rose by Bette Midler. She was the last speaker/singer and what we thought was going to be a 30 minute service had already careened well past an hour due to the amount of people who wanted to pay tribute.

How long could singing this song take, 3, maybe 5 minutes? I have read entire works of fiction in less time then it took the crazy cousin to get through this

She read each and every stanza in order to tell us what the words meant to her. Did she forget she was about "sing" each and every stanza? Also this is a well known song and not one that you would generally think of needed translating. It is pretty straight forward. Now if she had related these meanings to Trish that would be one thing but does the following sounds like it is about Trish: (oh yeah she is already 10 minutes in to preaching when she says this)

"I have made many mistakes in my life, I mean big big mistakes. Life changing mistakes bigger than you would ever guess. (At this point I am invested and would like to know what this person has done that is so bad, or at least why we deserve to sit through this.) I made these because "It's the heart afraid of breaking that never learns to dance". (Ummm ok. The look on her face actually scared me at this point.) I want you to understand you have to forgive, I man my father was an asshole but I forgave him. Ok wait my father really isn't an asshole that was just an example. I actually love my father very much. (BTW he was there and I the look on his face was, well fairly astounded to put it mildly. With all of the assholes in the world why would you choose your father as an example when he is sitting 25 feet from you. Choose someone none of us know. She clearly has issues with her father that she hasn't dealt with.)

Fifteen minutes of preaching and mind blowing confessions later she finally got around singing the song, which is all Trish wanted her to do. I just hope the experience was as cathartic for the cousin as it was painful for everyone else.

Thank you to everyone for their support.