| last modified 4 Nov 2007 |
All of the photos shown below were used in the slideshow presentation at Mom's memorial service at First Baptist Church of Sorrento. (The originals are not distorted, but the thumbnails you see here are a bit distorted by the grid formatting.) If you would like me to send you a full-sized version of one of these pix, you can find the filename of the photo by holding the mouse pointer over it for a few seconds. Just tell me the filename.
If you are in my family or are a close friend of the family, you should persuade either me or Dad to send you a CD-ROM containing all these photos.
all the photos above, presented on Dad's web server
Before the slideshow, several people got up and talked about Mom, and so did I.
Mom's name is Lois. She died on October 28th, 2006.
I want to show you the "Hi and Lois" comic strip from Oct 28 '06:
worry about today...
The Knox County traffic report about Mom's accident has the following four dates listed.
I wish the Caribou Coffee line of snack bars would fail miserably and get taken off all store shelves. Everytime I see the Caribou Coffee logo, I remember that the last thing Mom ever bought me was one of their treats. She'd impulsively bought it for me (along with a can of Dr Pepper) from a vending machine about 7 hours before she died. For some reason, I am displacing my anger about that day onto the Caribou Coffee people — crazy.
Other things that remind me of Mom can escape my anger (like the can of Dr Pepper) because they are well-established things, things which do not have an exclusive attachment in my mind between themselves and my Mom. I can think of the game show "Jeopardy" as both Mom's favorite show and as the topic of a Weird Al song. I can think of the closest Chick-Fil-A franchise as a place where Mom and I ate our last sit-down meal together and ALSO as a place where Bethany and I often eat lunch together. But the only memory I will ever make about Caribou Coffee snacks is the lingering memory of October 28th.
Don't know why this happens, but two big things always persuade me that life is meaningless.
(1) Flying in an airplane: I look down on big cities as if they were specks on an atlas, and I think, geez, the earth is a big place full of tiny tiny people, including me. Imagine how insignificant I am in the overall picture of the billions of universes that exist.
(2) The death of someone close to me (or even my own death): a powerful way to see that random things happen at unpredictable times. That leads me to believe that my existence on this planet is a similarly random and unpredictable fluke.
Imagine how great it feels to experience both of these things within a short timespan. I'm ready to quit my jobs and just watch TV nonstop for the next 30 years. Would anything else really matter?
For the first time since she died, I dreamed about Mom. And it was unreal. In the dream, I knew that she was dead, so I was crying as I spoke to her. The details escape me, as far as what we said or where we were, but I do remember that she was dressed up, and she was applying chapstick to the sideview mirror of her pickup truck. (It's hard to forget something as strange as that.)
When I got back from Florida, 15 sympathy cards were waiting for me. Most of them were from the company I work for; each branch office that knows me (like the Danville office) had sent me a card.
I found it bizarre that only 1 of these 15 cards came from a friend on my postcard list. I mean, every time I go on a trip, I send out lots of snail mail to the same group of people, and now that I finally get incoming snail mail, it's not from them at all. Weird!
Granted, support from much of my "postcard list" came in different forms, like visits or whatever. But it was strange to get so much snail mail and find that almost none of it was from people I send correspondence to.
Wanna give a special shout-out to Danielle's sister, Valerie's mom, and Heather's mom, all of whom sent cards.
UPDATE ON 20061115: extra shout-out to Amy, Heather's former roommate from college.
UPDATE ON 20061117: extra shout-out to Danielle's mom.
I'm writing this update on Nov 4, 2007, right after I've watched the special "100th Episode" of Family Guy on Fox TV. There was an eerie coincidence about this show and my life; in the show, the mom is named Lois, and she gets killed. Then, rather unusually, the show fast-forwards to one year later, and the main characters discuss her absence and her death. I gotta say, it freaked me out a little.
Similarly, while I was in Florida last week, Dad and I watched a new episode of The Sarah Silverman Program on Comedy Central, and the storyline paid much attention to the death of Sarah's mother. Very freaky.
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Extra tags for this page: mother, mommy, Rachel's grandma