Woke up early, tried to eat some breakfast. No appetite. My diet consists of tea and coffee for now. Ken came back over and we headed off to the funeral home. It was a very surreal experience walking towards the door. I could feel myself resisting with all my might. It felt like I was walking through water.
They greeted us at the door and took us to a private room and showed us our pricing options, basically from a menu like you’d get at the car wash. I guess there’s really no other way to do it. Wow, it’s expensive and you really can’t shop around, but honestly, the last thing I cared about was the cost. I wondered what people who don’t have money do. We chose Andy’s casket from a small sample on the wall, chose the guest book, chose a cemetery, signed a million documents, talked about “outer burial containers”…i.e. a vault, chose some flowers, talked about the calling hours. They would be on Thursday from 6:00 – 9:00 and the funeral would be on Friday at 10:30. The lady that helped us was very kind, and she even had us laughing a couple of times. She made it remarkably bearable. I asked her if I could see Andy today, and she said no, he wasn’t ready for viewing yet. I asked her if she would cut me some of his hair to keep, and she said she would make sure that got done. She also asked me if I wanted the friendship bracelet he had made and was wearing. I absolutely did, and she brought it to me. I wore it all week. I’d be wearing it still, but I want to have it forever, and I don’t want to wear it out. So I’m looking for the perfect frame to put it in. I still wear it for a minute every day.
The funeral home also asked us to pick out 75 of our favorite pictures of Andy which would be displayed on a projector during the calling hours. We went through box after box of pictures, and it brought back such sweet, happy memories. Some we had long forgotten. We realized after going through them that Andy really did have a happy childhood, and he made those years precious for us. We loved our son, and he knew it. And, God, he was a beautiful little boy who grew up into a very handsome young man.
Then we left. One huge hurdle gotten over. We went home. Ken wrote Andy’s obituary, which in my opinion, was the most beautiful obituary ever written. It celebrated Andy’s life, his reason for being here, and gave everyone who read it a sense of who he really was. Just recently we found a blog on the internet by a woman we’ve never met who had seen Andy’s obituary and talked about how much it, and Andy’s life, had touched her, even though she never met him. Wow. So you see, my beautiful boy continues to touch people even now. He’s still making me proud. I love my son.
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