MAY 5, SUNDAY

ROUTE 81 AGAIN

It rained most of the way to Asheville down Route 81 and I slept for most of the time. We did stop for a good Mexican meal at the half way point and got here at dark. So there there is not much to report or to show.

The main thing on my mind on Sunday was enjoying have breakfast with the Mahy family, sister Sara and her husband Doug and Mary and her husband Craig, whose mother’s memorial service we attended Saturday. Funerals and weddings bring people together. And since cremation became the chosen option for many people, including Joyce Chippendale, the need for the funeral to quickly follow death has changed the way that we gather and treat the death of a person. I recorded the service on video and from the prelude to the actual service you can hear a church full of people talking with each other. There wasn’t a sense of bewilderment or sorrow in the face of death, we experienced that months ago in February when Joyce died. There really was a sense of being drawn together as friends and a celebration of Joyce’s life which was done so well by her grandchildren, Kjersti and Anders Chippindale, who had flown in from the West Coast. I have never felt that I had a good time at a funeral, but the whole weekend and the memorial service was a good time and left me feeling good.

One of the things that Craig and Mary were accomplishing during this last week was deciding to do with Joyce’s possessions in preparation for selling the house that she and her husband moved to 30 years ago.

This was painful for Craig in particular as he decided what to do with his mother’s things, having to sell or send to Goodwill most of her furnishings since there were no nearby relatives to inherit or take away anything.

But my being 86, this process made me more acutely aware of what a problem everything I and Kathe collected in our lifetimes will now cause. The process Craig and Mary are going through is exactly the one my children will go through one of these days. I am still here but instead of buying new things I am realizing with greater intensity each year that the mountain of stuff I have collected will have little value if sold and will either go to Goodwill or the dump. I came away from Joyce’s old home with a song book “Favorite Hymns of Praise” with songs from my long ago childhood missionary days and a golf trophy, a large silver chalice, now corroding that Craig’s grandfather, H.Chippendale, won for winning a tournament at the Woodhaven Golf Club in 1914, grabbing it as it was about to go out the door to the dump because I couldn’t let the old man go like that. But now that I have them they sadden me since very soon no one will know the old hymns or have any connection to the name Chippendale and they will be the first thing out the door after I die including almost everything else that I see in my living room as I sit here writing this.