Geez Louise, These Mom Eulogies...

Some folks asked me to share this as they weren't there to hear it for the first and the only time, so here you have it...

I’ve struggled quite a bit trying to figure out what to say right now…trying to figure out what words could possibly sum up the enormity of Mom’s impact on everyone here and I finally realized that it’s basically an impossible task. I won’t be able to convey what she meant to all of us with words, but that’s all I have. I didn’t bother studying sign language like Mom did, so this is all you get. 

When my Dad died, I felt as if I should get up and talk at his funeral, but I didn’t. 

I was just a kid.

I was scared. 

I didn’t think I could stand up there in front of everyone and actually say anything that mattered enough to deserve being up there in the first place, and I sure didn’t think I’d be able to read whatever I may have prepared with a constant stream of tears running down my face. I was probably right about that, but I still feel I should have said something. I didn’t. 

  

Dad’s exit was brief, unexpected and shattering. I remember being in the kitchen at Mom’s and Jennifer telling me that Dad was in a coma and in that moment I thought to myself that he wouldn’t be coming out of it. I don’t know when he first felt it, but his whole life was spent battling an illness that never relented, never left, never allowed for a simple bit of happiness and piece of mind. His death may have seemed quick to us, but with each day being nothing more than a struggle to reach the next, I’m sure it felt like an eternity for Dad.

Mom called me at work on October 5th, 2016 and left a message asking me to call her back as soon as I could. That wasn’t the normal Mom message and when I went outside and called her back, she let me know her doctors had found something in her lung that wasn’t quite right.

I’ve had 15 months to prepare for this, but I didn’t do a very good job with those preparations. I was lulled into a false sense of everything is going to be okay when she received her cancer free diagnosis a few months later. I just assumed she was going to be the exception to the rule. I believed she had beaten it. If anyone deserved to be here as long as possible, it was Mom. I wasn’t naive enough to think it wouldn’t still be a battle, but I just assumed it would be a battle that she would always have the upper hand in. 

I was naive, I was ignorant, and I was very wrong. 

For whatever reason, cancer always seems to get the upper hand. 

It’s times like these where I wish I had my Mom’s faith. 

Hers wasn’t a pretend faith.

Hers wasn’t a blind faith.

Hers wasn’t this one is the right faith. 

Hers was the best kind of faith.

The kind that is decent.

The kind that is caring. 

The kind that has no strings attached. 

It was a quiet and unassuming faith. 

Her faith was real. 

Mom took what she had been taught early on in life to a level that I don’t think most people ever reach. 

Oops…there I go again making assumptions and judging. 

Now you know why I don’t have her kind of faith. Don’t judge another until you’ve walked a mile in their shoes, right?

I’m pretty sure Mom must have been wearing shoes that were one size fits all as I don’t think she needed to try on other peoples shoes, let alone walk a mile in them. She already seemed to know how they fit. She just let you be you and that was the end of it. No questions asked. If you needed someone to talk to for whatever reason, she was always there ready to listen. 

I wish I had that kind of faith, but I don’t. Not like Mom. 

The last few days and nights my brothers and sisters and I took turns watching over her and taking care of her as she slipped farther and farther beyond our understanding. Her words, which were always so clear and concise, reverted back into sounds which made no sense to us. All we wanted was to understand her one more time so we could make sure she was comfortable and not in pain, but we couldn’t. We just had to guess at what she needed, much like what she had done for all of us all those years ago.

For her sake, I hope one of us managed to guess correctly. 

All I ever hear when someone dies is that God must have had other plans for that person. Plans which, conveniently, always seem to be more important than the plans they were supposed to be taking care of here on Earth. 

I’m just not convinced that’s always the case. It doesn’t make sense to me. 

I watched as the priest knelt down and absolved my Mom of all her sins. I spent the next few days trying to convince her to absolve me of all my sins against her, but I’m not sure how successful I was at that. I also told her that if God needs her more up there than he does down here, things must have really taken a turn for the worse up there in heaven. I didn’t think that sort of thing was possible, as it’s heaven and it’s supposed to be all good, right, but something must have gone haywire. Who knows…perhaps they just had a need for a more competent, skilled secretary capable of processing all the new applicants in a timely manner and assigning each of them their own cloud? I don’t have any idea. Let’s just go with that one though…It makes as much sense as anything else to me right now. 

Perhaps I don’t have that faith that Mom had during her life, but I had enough faith here at the end to give her one last bit of advice for her journey upwards. Mom loved her music, but always at a low volume. She didn’t always take too kindly to the turned up all the way music coming from the bedroom next to hers. I tried to tell Dan to quiet it down, but he just never listened…shocking, I know. I told her that she needed to stop off along the way and pick up a good pair of ear plugs as she was about to experience the loudest, most thunderous applause ever received at those pearly gates. 

Sail on Silver Girl

Sail on by

Your time has come to shine

All Your dreams are on their way

Thank you for being the very best a person can be Mom! I love you! 

Hi Ya! Sushi Fortune.

To be honest, I didn't realize that sushi restaurants handed out fortune cookies, but apparently this one does. My brother Dan has asked me countless times to accompany him to an all you can eat sushi restaurant over by Martyr's and most of the time, I've declined the invitation, but a few weeks ago, I didn't.

I should have.

That's no fault of the quality of the restaurant or the quality of the sushi. It was just that the restaurant wasn't going to be open all that long and I guess I'm just too old to sit and stuff appetizers and seaweed salad and nigiri and sushi down the gullet as fast as...perhaps that 400 pound dude Trump said might be infiltrating the DNC servers. Now I don't know if that hacker was a fan of sushi, but if he really was 400 pounds, I'm going to guess he might have fared better than I did that night.

Super fatty white tuna or whatever it is called is still my favorite.

I don't care if that's racist or not. I can't help it.

And obviously, I'm no stranger to body shaming creatures of the sea.

Near the end of this fast paced culinary shenanigan, not only was I lamenting my last order, but upon it's arrival, I was eating the fish and stuffing all the rice into a napkin...which eventually ended up being pocketed in my hoodie so we were assured no extra charges. Yeah, I know...Dan and I only eat sushi at the classiest of sushi joints. Go fuck yourself if you're judging us right now. And yes, I threw that balled up rice into the nearest garbage can once we exited the restaurant.

So here's the deets on that fortune.

Daily Numbers 2, 7, 4

Lotto Six #'s 55, 82, 64, 9, 36, 20

It's that desperate that they are actually just giving out the lotto numbers as opposed to just a string of lucky numbers? Just one more reason for me to despise whatever this is we've all come to recognize as existence.

And the fortune...

A Modest Man Never Talks of Himself.

Not true at all, but I understand where this sushi sage is coming from.

Sometimes you need to talk about yourself and your own experiences in order to convey some sort of wisdom to another. However, and this is where I agree with this fish finder, most of the time, it's not necessary.

I've been subject to a few experiences over the past few years that when I need to talk about them to someone else most of the time as soon as I'm done expressing a bit of why I need to talk, they've already spent most of that time not listening to my words, but thinking about what similar experiences they've had and just how they are going to tell me all about those experiences which I really couldn't give a shit about, as those experiences are nothing like what I'm experiencing and have just about no relevance to my desire to escape the mental abyss I'm all too easily cascading down.

I get it. It's just natural to throw out your own experience, but for the sake of whoever you are talking to just don't for at least seven minutes after you realize someone needs to talk about whatever the heck they need to talk about. Just listen. Just listen. Suck up your need to talk about your own experience and let that person vent for just a bit. I'm only asking seven minutes of your time. Most likely, after seven minutes, enough heartache or sorrow or anger will have been expressed that you can finally breathe easy and let your own narcissistic freak flag fly. Let it out. Shout out your personal understanding. Let it out.

And if, by chance, it only takes them three minutes to vent, I'd suggest you stay silent for the remaining four minutes. That will give you both plenty of time to fully understand the depth of what's been presented. For the venter, that four minutes will most likely allow for the realization that whatever they were bitching about really wasn't that important if it only lasted three minutes, and for the listener, you'll have four minutes with which to come up with something, anything to tear this muthersucker complainer a new one to let him or her know they shouldn't waste your time like this!

Or you can just spend four minutes trying to cower down inside their shoes where the fear smells the most.

I'd suggest the latter, rather than the former.

Now I just need to take my own advice and put it into use.

I try. I do try, but it's not always so easy.

Nothing seems to be easy these days.

I'm not sure if I'm here to learn from others and live life to the fullest, or if I'm just here to be some sort of example (good or bad) to someone else.

Right now, I feel like the latter.

I wish I was EZ Dave Haines right now. That dude must've had it so easy.

Sleazily Easy at that.