A Moment to Post!

Its quiet. No one else is clamouring for the computer. I have a couple of hours before I need to be ready to head to the funeral.

I wanted to grab this chance to post a heartfelt thanks for all the kind comments you have left for me. I will respond to each but in the meantime please know what a wonderful difference they have made!

We spent yesterday at the funeral home. It was a blur of kind faces from the past and stalwart friends from daily life punctuated with numerous amazing collections of mounted photos, digital frames and a huge screen featuring hundreds of photos of my brother`s life and adventures. The double A hockey team my brother coached and on which his youngest son is a player all arrived en masse in their team shirts. It was heartbreaking to see these boysbecomingmen trying to face the hard evidence that life doesn`t always end in old age. This man had been their Coach, their team mate`s Dad!

We had a home cooked dinner here last night between the afternoon visitation and the one in the evening.  My mom, her sister and her eldest son, here from NYC for the funeral and more like a brother to me, joined us. It was a great and much needed break that made the evening session seem less difficult than the afternoon had been.   

The service today will feature eulogists, readers and pall bearers from my brother`s legion of life long friends and fellow minor hockey parents and players.  The priest who will celebrate the service was a Flying Father - a group of Catholic Hockey playing priests who play to raise money for charity and are considered the Harlem Globe Trotters of Hockey. How fitting!

Speaking of fitting - the lengthy and sometimes tense ;) negotiations with my offspring as to what they should wear today and what they wore yesterday were all wrapped up earlier in the week. (Apparently I have no idea what is considered `too dressy`)`. Anyway since its all sorted out I needn`t deal with anything of issue today on the domestic front. Whew!

The weather forecast is utterly funereal - rain, rain and rain. Fortunately my hair cut from last week hasn`t left much to get messed up by moisture!

As for everything else, the funeral programs my daughter and I put together and had printed are ready to go, the childhood hockey pictures of my brother I assembled for the hockey corner at the reception are mounted and waiting by the door with his childhood hockey jacket and his current Coaching jacket that will also be part of the hockey display.  Very soon we`ll soon go to my brother`s funeral. 

Just typing that sentence is surreal!