A New Perspective

I’ll be taking a few days away from the keyboard as I travel to NJ for our mother’s funeral mass, interment of her cremated remains in the mausoleum with our dad and a family and friends luncheon. I’m looking forward to telling a few stories and seeing some folks I haven’t seen in years.

I took this photo (with the old Olympus) at Edisto Beach, SC in 2011. It has been used on websites and other places. It is one of my favorite images over the years.

As executor, I’ll also be handling all the administrative tasks required.  Hopefully, and I am cautiously optimistic, any family drama will be kept to a minimum.

I have been in active funeral service since the Summer of 1978 and think I have a pretty good handle on being compassionate and understanding when it comes to death.  What I had no idea about until recently was how exhausting, both mentally and physically, being responsible (or co-responsible) for a parent’s care during what turned out to be the last weeks of their life.  As I stated before, no one deserves to go through what mom did those final weeks, isolated (COVID+) as her body and mind quickly deteriorated after a minor fall in late April.

Having gone through that experience, I have a new perspective and will now be a better funeral director because “every day you don’t learn something new is a day you have wasted”. Mrs. Humphrey is again smiling down on me.  (She’s the 6th grade teacher that drilled that lesson into my head)

See y’all in a week or so. . . or maybe sooner.