It was such a lovely service, considering why we had to be there. The minister did such a wonderful job that many people commented it was one of the best they had ever heard. There was about 150 people there just in the guest book which not everyone signed. So there wasn't enough room for everyone to sit in the main room but they were able to hear everything from the surrounding rooms. Considering it was a holiday weekend & a Sun morning service, that was quite a bit more than we expected to be there. My dear daughter touched a lot of lives & had done a lot of volunteer work plus many friends & co-workers took the time to honor her life with us.
It looked like a lovely house not a creepy funeral place at all & the people were wonderful there. The people that run it said that was their intent, to make it look & feel like a comfortable home where they can make a very trying time as easy as possible. They definitely succeeded. They didn't even mind that I took our little poodle when when we made the arrangements & said she wasn't the first furbaby to be there. My ex sister in law blew a gasket when I brought her to the service but she was extremely well behaved & never made a peep even with all the people. [I mean our furbaby was well behaved, ex sister law was snippy then just pretended I wasn't there at all the rest of the day].
We accidently ended up having our D's service on my mom's birthday who died in 1982, which was an interesting coincidence. My mom didn't get to spend much time at all with my daughters which were her first grandchildren but she adored them as long as she could. The store my daughters work & worked for brought over enough food & sodas to my DD's house for the entire neighborhood, so that was one less detail to worry about & extremely generous.
I'd found heart shaped stones that different sayings on it that I really liked. I got my surviving daughter, her father & identical ones that said "freedom" on it. I explained to them that when we mourn & miss B, grieve over what we have lost without her presence in our lives we also have to take into consideration what she has gained. Freedom from all the earth's problems, suffering & evils to be perfectly safe, happy, loved & now exactly as she was created to be by God while perfectly protected by Him.
It was funny because I told D's dad I'd gotten identical gifts for him, my surviving D & myself but wanted to explain it first. He laughed & said he'd consider the source, but he immediately understood what I was saying about the heart shaped stone with "freedom" on it & was very touched to get it.
The funeral director commented on how nice it was that my ex husband, daughter, husband & I were able to sit together to work out all the details the way we did. He said they sometimes have to put divorced parents in different rooms & still have a lot of flying fur. I told him we'd always tried to put our children't best interest first, even tho we certainly had our disagreements over the years. It was very nice to be able to work together to do the last things we could for our D on this earth.
I had gotten my D's boyfriend who was in the car when the accident happened, a similar heart shaped stone with the word "love" on it. His worse injury only required two stitches. Right after my D passed, I told him he had nothing to do with causing or contributing to the accident, nothing he did or didn't do could have prevented it. But what he had done was to make my D happy in the car on the way to visit her grandmother who she dearly loves so was very happy until all hell broke loose. That he had stayed with her the nearly an hour it took to get my D out of the car, refused to leave her alone & insisted in riding in the ambulance with her & stayed at the hospital from Mon afternoon when she got there until Wed when she died without leaving one time.
She was in & out of consciousness until they took her in the operating room but knew she was never without someone who loved her there, even before the rest of us arrived. I told him he'd survived a terrible accident which was going to cause him truama too even if not as physical as what happened to my D, & that he would likely be hit hard with survivor's guilt & most likely PTSD as well, so he needed to find a good minister and/or therapist to talk that out with. That it was important for him to remember he did all he could her as best as he could. But sometimes just the choatic randomness of this world causes horrible things to happen to good people, & that she was safe now in a way we could never give or get for her here until she was in God's hands the way she is now.
My heart goes out to him, he was probably dreading & expecting that we'd all start screaming at him that it should have been him so fatally hurt instead of our D which never happened by anyone. They had known each other quite a while but only been dating a month when this happened. They had started going to church together right before this happened. One of the most comforting parts of my D's sermon was when the minister said we didn't have to worry about my D, we knew she was in God's hands.
I'd have to be hospitalized if I didn't know that, to think this life was it & we'd never be reunited would be unbearable. The hard part left is when we take my D to her gravesite, but that probably won't take place until next Sat. And yes, the furbaby will be with us then too, regardless of the bristling fur that will cause with ex sister in law. We almost didn't bring our littlest furbaby with us, at the last minute I decided not to leave her home & I'm glad we did although she definitely doesn't like the hot weather here at all, poor thing.
Again, thank you very much for all the prayers & support, it is such a trying time...
[This message edited by unicornsearcher at 4:36 AM, September 6th (Monday)]
