Where've I been this time?

I had planned to be back blogging again once we got back to Fredericton, probably Wednesday evening, but I'm quite a bit later than that now because frankly I was in a pretty bad mood over a fairly minor setback and I really wasn't interested in doing the sort of writing I do here. Maybe if it were a simple bit of recounting the day's events I might be able to do that, but it's never been about being a simple chronicle, so if I'm not in the right frame of mind I'm only going to end up frustrated and disappointed with the result. There weren't many of you around for my little writing project back about six or seven years ago but it was plagued by similar problems.

So where was I? The funeral and the wake, I guess. There were a lot of people who came through that I didn't recognize at all, another group that I recognized and couldn't put names to (some of those were because the people had changed a lot and some of those were just because my memory has never been good for connecting names and faces) and the usual group that I get to see most times I'm on the Island. I've only been to a few wakes like that before so maybe they're mostly like Mom's was, but I was really struck by how many people sat around after they'd come by to talk to us and just were chatting amongst themselves. It really was almost a party atmosphere, without the music and drinking, I guess, which is more than I'd hoped for. Around the end of the evening someone, I can't even remember who now, one of Mom's cousins, I think, came by to tell us that they were going to invite everyone over to their place after the wake to keep sitting around and chatting. We decided not to go -- by then I was feeling wiped out -- but that kind of confirmed my impression, that it was a social event and enough people were enjoying themselves that they decided to keep it going. I'm sure Mom would've liked that.

Thursday morning was beautiful. It was already around 15°C by the time we left the house and by mid-day it was into the low twenties. We drove over to the funeral home and had a few quiet moments with Mom before we had to head over to the church. There had been a social group Mom had been active in that was going to come over in the morning, they had planned to come as a group and since it involved people from all over the Island they had asked if we would mind if they came on Thursday morning, visited her briefly before the funeral and then went over to the church to save the members from coming to town twice. I said I didn't mind at all but it turns out that nearly all of the group had decided to come Wednesday night anyway and come back on Thursday morning, so there wasn't too many people there in the morning.

The two things that stand out best for me from that morning at the funeral home was the complete sense of loss I felt when I came in to the room and saw her lying there and said "Good morning, Mom," in the same way I had been every morning for the last three weeks. I know that by that point it was just a body, it wasn't her anymore, but that sense of it being the last time I'd get to say that with her in the room was harder than I expected.

The other thing was when we were leaving and I kissed her forehead. There was enough make-up and such that it didn't feel like her at all, I don't think I'll forget that sensation for a very long time, but in a weird way that was comforting. It really made the point to me that the casket didn't hold anything terribly important to me, the essential part of Mom is somewhere else now.

The actual funeral was conducted by Fr. Brad Sweet, a very young priest in the parish, though I'm also sure Mom would've liked him. He's actually an interesting character himself. He was ordained on August 19th (I think) and was appointed to the parish on September 1st, so he was very new, though he had been a deacon in Tignish for quite some time, I guess. He's something of an anomaly, though, since he converted to Roman Catholicism at 28 and then decided that he wanted to become a priest, eventually getting special permission to allow him to do so because he was already married. Speculation among the folks I talked to was pretty rampant about how old he actually is -- I think he looks younger than me -- but he's probably not much more than his mid-40s.

At the graveyard it was sunny and warm, a perfect early-September day, quite a bit warmer than it had been over the days when Trish and Jim had been in town with us and I found myself really wishing she could be there with me. Immediately after the service I sent her a text message letting her know how things had gone and that I was doing okay. At least as okay as could be expected, I suppose.

The CWL had a reception for everyone back at the church and by the time we made our way back there I realized just how critically we'd misjudged things in that respect. I think we'd said we expected about fifty people and that many of Mom's friends and relatives had offered to bring sweets so we only needed them to provided sandwiches and beverages. By the time we returned from the cemetery, though, there was standing room only and I'm sure there were a hundred people, probably more than that with the arrivals and departures. It was yet another one of those moments where I realized just how many people knew and loved my mother, whom I'd always kind of seen as having a reasonably quiet life. The fact is, yes, she had been quiet a lot of the time, but she had been involved and that had mattered greatly to many more people than I'd realized.

I've debated this next point quite a bit over the last few weeks, what I write about it because I don't want anyone reading this to read anything else into it, there are still some pretty tense subjects in my family, but ultimately this is for me and I don't want to forget it. After we had left the reception I came out to the car and parked beside us was my cousin, Kent. He and I used to be inseparable when we were kids. As far back as I can remember he and I would play together when my mom and his mother (my cousin Sheila) would get together. A combination of things sort of separated us a while back, silly family stuff to some degree but I think it was more just age and changing priorities, these things happen after all. He apologized for not having been in the reception and at the funeral but he'd had a couple of emergencies with his business he had to take care of -- I don't really think that had as much to do with it as some potential other awkwardness, but that's irrelevant now -- but he wanted to make sure he came by to express his sympathy and to try to offer a little comfort. That's about all I'll say on it, I guess. He was there and he wanted me to know he was there, which meant a lot to me.

So we had the remainder of Thursday and Friday planned to take care of whatever business we could do, then head back to Fredericton on Saturday and back to Ottawa on Sunday, with everything moving up a day early if we wrapped up everything on Thursday and Friday morning.

Now we're finally back to the part that led me to make the statement in part one of this update that I was assuming stuff not everyone knew. We knew there was going to be stuff that we needed to do with another trip to the Island. Mom's car, which I'd been the legal owner of since July, needed to be driven back. The headstone wouldn't be in place until mid-October and Jim Peters hadn't expected us to pay for it until it was placed. There was a lot of stuff that belonged to Mom that we were going to move back with us. This was all stuff that probably could have been dealt with while we were there at the time but after the previous three weeks I was utterly exhausted and I didn't feel up to anything. I just wanted to get back to work and try to get some kind of normal routine back into my life for a bit. So we decided that we would use the unused half of my plane ticket, the one that Christine had booked for me to return on September 21st, to fly back to the Island around Thanksgiving and we would rent a moving van, load it up with Mom's stuff and drive back after that. The matter of driving Mom's car back would probably remain un-addressed until Christmas.

The next week back at work was mercifully quiet and I spent the better part of a couple of evenings doing nothing but writing thank-you cards for people who had made donations in Mom's memory or who had sent us cards or helped out at the funeral or wake in some way. The week after I was travelling for work and the next week back at the office it was still reasonably quiet so I had evenings free to sort through some more of Mom's papers as well as our own.

During that time, though, we did some estimation and determined that it would be almost the same cost to us to have professional movers move most of Mom's stuff from Brenda and Steve's basement as it would for us to rent a truck, pay for gas and insurance and such, so we opted to pay professionals and instead fly home for Thanksgiving drive the car back this time. I kind of liked that option better because I didn't want to gamble on good weather at Christmas for Christine and I to each do solo drives back, particularly with two cars we'd never driven in snow before.

So that largely brings us up to date. We flew down on Saturday, a week ago yesterday, and had turkey and all the accouterments on Sunday and Steve and Brenda's and again on Monday at noon with my father. Monday evening we went to have dinner with my cousin Sheila (yep, Kent's mother) and her husband Kenny thanks mostly to running into Kenny by accident in the Sobey's on Saturday night, and then back to have leftovers with Dad on Tuesday night. Lots of big meals were had on a Thanksgiving were Christine and I had no solid plans and had to turn down at least two invitations from my family in Ontario.

By Tuesday morning we had a reasonably long list of things we had to do. Christine and I both agreed it looked like more than one day's worth of work but it probably wasn't more than two, so we'd still be able to stick to the current plan of driving back to Fredericton Wednesday evening, visit with her family on Thursday then back on Friday morning. It turns out, though, that we accomplished everything we needed to do on Tuesday and so Wednesday morning was just getting up, going to visit the grave where the new headstone had been placed the day before, and then back to Freddy.

I guess it was a bad sign that Wednesday morning, while we were loading the car with our luggage and a few things that were too delicate to send with the movers, we saw the first of the season's snow, but it was light and didn't last long so I didn't sweat it too much. A bit of a warning that not all would go as planned, though, I guess. Wednesday evening we visited Bill and Jackie, Christine's sister and brother-in-law, and both on the way there and the way back I noticed an increased frequency of a problem that I'd seen once on the Island on Tuesday. The car was struggling to shift from second to third gear. Thursday morning we had a leisurely breakfast with Christine's parents and then planned to go make a few critical stops (visiting the comic shop I used to frequent when I was in university, long since moved from the original location but still overseen by the same friend was chief among them) but we were hardly halfway to town before the problem with the automatic transmission (it's a shame it's financially impractical to convert this vehicle to a manual, I'd do it in a second if I could) became impossible to ignore. The only good side to that was that the idiot-light came on then, too, which is normally the sign that a code has been logged to the computer, so it's not just me explaining in vague terms what's wrong.

It turns out that the computer controlling the transmission was reporting its own failure. I suppose a good thing but basically just confirming what I already knew. The good news is that the component in question is still under warranty despite Mom's car having been a 2002 model. The bad news is they couldn't get a replacement in until Monday so our plans of returning and me being back to work next week are shot. The current plan (keep in mind this is Sunday afternoon and a lot can change tomorrow morning as they start replacing the computer) is for us to drive back on Tuesday and return to work on Wednesday. On the up-side, I don't have an intermittent shifting problem in the black magic (as far as I know) that is an automatic transmission to have looked at as soon as we get there.