We saw our pastor this morning and talked through the funeral details. There’ll be a private small family cremation followed by a celebration of Jane’s life on Monday 6th June at City Church Derby (Curzon Street) at 12pm. http://www.derbycitychurch.co.uk/#/contact-info. This will be followed by refreshments in the Hope Centre opposite the church and obviously all are welcome to join us in remembering my lovely wife on this important day.
The explosions of grief have begun to ease which is a relief at least in a practical sense. They tended to be a little too unpredictable… not at all a good idea whilst driving for example! But I’ve managed to keep busy with family still around and grand-children scattering toys quite liberally all around the house. Preparing for the funeral is more than a little challenging with the obvious on-going tension between great sadness and joyful celebration of all that Jane has been. I guess that’s what funerals should be about though.
It’s such an important day for family and close friends though and that demands more than a little time to try and make it as personal as possible. I understand the temptation to simply allow the thing to be as simple as possible with little or no hands-on participation. But I’m trusting the tears will be under some sort of control and plan to take part in some way… and a few public tears are no problem anyway. And it’s quite distracting playing around with old photos and even a rather blurry but rather amusing video of our wedding. Until all of a sudden there’s a highly pregnant Jane standing with our 3 children on a beach about 23 years ago and the tears flow again. I can’t work out what causes me to cry and what doesn’t, it’s all a bit random.
Although the technology's moved on it brought back so many memories when my bedroom was transformed into an impromptu recording studio. It’s years since I played and sang with one of my daughters trying to personalise a backing track to one of the presentations… but it was great to have something ‘normal’ to do and it felt good. Then I sat on my settee to enjoy a few words with my older grand-daughters and glanced down at something. The last time Jane walked around a shop was months ago and she struggled, hobbling with breathing difficulties but quite determined to buy a cross-stitch kit, something she’d enjoyed after one of her major ops. Anyway after all that effort she’s barely started it and it’s silly but I couldn’t cope. My grand-daughters were ideally situated on tissue duty though!
Proverbs 17:6 ‘Grandchildren are the crowning glory of the aged; parents are the pride of their children’ (NLT)
No comments:
Post a Comment