thanks to all of you for your supportive posts, I am delighted to share my experiences with the hope that someone who has felt the frustration that I have felt can relate to it and know that there is hope, you can carry on with your life even though you are grieving. There is a little more to the aftermath after Chris's death, and I'll write more later!
Just as a follow thru on my earlier post about my time with Chris back in the 60's,70's,80's and 90's, I want to tell you the tale of the Little Miracle of the Cemetery.
As I noted in my earlier post I have an older sister. She and I were very close while she was living at home when I was a little boy. My sister is 12 years older than I am. We have no other siblings younger or older, and she doted on me, took care of me, and generally spoiled me when I was a boy. When she left for college I was about 6 years old and I cried bitterly. I missed her so much, and we contined to be close even after she married and started her own family. As I got older and went off to college, she became more distant and judgemental of me. Well, you can guess why. She is a devoted Southern Baptist who sings loudly out of the Broadman hymnal. To her my life was a bit of a contradiction. We had a couple of conversations when I was about 21, where she gave me lectures about "heading in the wrong direction." Interestingly, my parents, as conservative as they were never gave me even one word of reproach. Never one unkind word. They were always supportive.
Moving time forward, after my parents grew elderly we made the decision as a family to move them into an assisted living facility. I was executor of their estate and mostly handled all of their retirement issues. My sister was supportive and she and her children and grandchildren, visited my parents, showered them with gifts, cards, flowers, etc, but I was the one who assumed day-to-day care. If any of you out there have been or have become the primary caregivers for your elderly parents, then you can relate to me when I tell you that that is a almost a full time occupation in and of itself. I am not griping, I am so grateful for all of the support and opportunities my parents gave to me thru the years, that I performed this task unflinchingly. My memories of caring for my elderly parents are are fulfilling happy memories. I am so happy to have had the time in their last years to get very close again to them.
After my Dad's incapacitation, I took over the day-to-day running of my family's business, my sister acted as co-operator but left the running to me by her choice. She and my brother in law have been very pleased with my decisions and we are now able to sell out to a larger independent - hence my impending retirement. After our parents death, my sister and I had all of the property and furnishings to divide. Most of the property was simple to deal with, it was already set up in trust by my parents,and my uncle and aunt. Easy to deal with, and both of us saw the division as fair. But, my parents furnishings, art, collections, and other personal effects were another matter. Oh, there was no real confrontational disagreements, it is just we never really could entirely agree, and everything had been sittting in storage for some time.
Now to the miracle. In the Spring of 2007, my sister and I agreed to meet in our hometown to sign some of the last documents disposing of some of our parents real property in the area. We were to meet at the bank at a particular time, and I arrived in town early and went to the cemetery. Weeds grow rapidly in the Spring so I wanted to tend the graves. I was digging in the soil and putting some new flowers out, when I looked up and saw my sister smiling at me. She said, "I saw your truck, and I wanted to stop and help". "Dig in!" I responded and handed her a trowel. We finished the normal maintenance of their graves and stood up. I was wiping my hands when she said to me, "Lets walk over to Chris's grave, I'll help you weed." I couldn't have been more flabbergasted! I cut right to the heart of the matter and said, "Youv'e known about Chris and me?" She nodded her head. (Well, we really do live in glass closets.) I took her by the hand and said, "Its time I told you my story." We talked for a couple of hours after that and doing our business at the bank. Very quickly after that, the log jam blocking the disposition of my parents furnishings vanished and all outstanding issues were resolved. All of the bridges between us that had been in very bad repair were suddenly whole again.
Afterwards we started keeping much closer in touch, and she and my brother-in-law were very supportive of my plans to sell out and retire. Now this is where this story gets more interesting.One day, in the early summer 2007, she and I were emailing and talked about some movies that her grown children had seen.I asked her if she had seen "Brokeback Mountain". She said no, and reminded me that the last movie that she and my brother in law went to the theater to see was "Pearl Harbor". They are not frequent theater attenders! I didn't say anything other than the movie has meant a great deal to me and probably has affected me more than any other movie I have ever seen.Later that day, I had an inspiration, I bought an extra copy of "Brokeback", put it in a mailer, and mailed it to her - no note inside, just the movie and my return address on the outside of the mailer. I had every expectation that she would send me a polite thank you card and that would be it. A week later, I get an email from her indicated her thanks for the movie. She then went on to say in the email that, "now I have to tell you that for a director who is said to strive for verisimilitude, he sure dropped the ball in that rodeo scene where the cowboy with the black hat meets the cute cowgirl with the red hat. Now you know that there are no free-standing groves of Pinetrees in the Childress,TX area.There are no trees at all! Look behind the rodeo events arena, there are a bunch of Pinetrees. Now, they filmed this movie in Canada, and that showed. Oh, and Petey (my brother in law) says the type of prefabbed steel horse barns pictured in that same scene was not sold until the late 1980's."
I couldn't have been more stunned. Not only did she watch the movie, but she watched it with my right wing homophobic brother in law, and they took the movie seriously and are critiqueing the small details! So, we started a friendly dialog about the Brokie trivia, the meaing of the shirt, the closets, etc. She had questions that I couldn't answer and wanted to. So, I went on line, discovered "Bettermost", "Ennisjack" and other sites and began looking for answers to our trivia questions. Overtime, I became an obsessed Brokie and felt the need to post my experiences.
One final miracle......last week I got a telephone call from her asking me what my plans were for Christmas. She wanted to invite me to join her family at her home. Now I haven't received an invitation like that in more than a decade. I told her that D.L. and I were making plans to go out of state to see some snow, I'm sentimental about snow at Christmas. She laughed and said of course she meant to include D.L. in the invitation! Well, that was one more stunned moment. I talked to D.L. about it and it looks like D.L. and I will be spending our Christmas here in Texas, we can see the snow later.