I really couldn't imagine having one this size.

I really couldn't imagine having one this size. My little brick-sized kid is bad enough. 😂😂😂

A post from a friend:

75# Tortoise........ "HEY! Open this door."

Me................. "You can't come out right now."

75# Tortoise........ "I do what I want."

Me................. "Sorry. I forgot."

Plant friends: I need help.

Plant friends:  I need help. These came home with us after the funeral and I don't know what they are or how to care for them. I also don't really have space for all of these, PLUS, Shaun has bad allergies so if anyone could give them a good home I would be grateful for that.

The green and white one is in a pot with dirt, so I'm guessing it could live if someone knew how to care for it. I like this one the most and would try to care for it if it's easy.

The yellow ones are in a pot with dirt, so I'm guessing they could live if someone knew how to care for them. These seem more pollen-y than the green and white and I don't think Shaun would want them indoors.

The multi-colored ones are stuck into green Styrofoam. Are they going to die? Can they be saved?

Shaun buried his last parent today.

Shaun buried his last parent today.  We're doing ok, all things considered.  It rained all day so our plan to be able to social distance at a graveside funeral didn't work out, but we'll quarantine to make sure we didn't catch COVID.  Mostly we're exhausted, and there is still a ton to do.  Thankfully, nothing urgent at this point.

These last few weeks have been so extremely hard.  It's hard to see a person suffer.  It's terrifying to watch someone's health decline with such speed.  It's a helpless and hopeless feeling to know that there is not anything you can do to stop anything that is happening.

If there is one thing I've learned from this experience it's that keeping a binder or drawer of IMPORTANT paperwork related to your eventual death would be so helpful for your loved ones.  We are definitely planning to get things in order for our kids, like, now.  The stress of finding all of the info that a funeral home requires, knowing if / where / how there are funds to help with burial expenses, etc., would save a lot of stress.  Put vet records, house deeds, car titles, advance directives, and the will in with this.  Add accounts, what they are for, what things mean.  Have a paper saying where the septic tank is.  Write down relevant family history that is usually seen in obituaries.  All I know is that when I die it's going to be hard enough and my final act of love towards my kids is going to be that I made my death as easy as possible for them.  There is really no reason not to do this, so please, DO it.

And with that, we're off to rest.  Goodnight, friends.

Funeral is over. We're home.

Funeral is over. We're home.

TL;DR:  I hated it and I'll be shocked, SHOCKED, if we don't end up having COVID.

First of all, it rained all day. HARD. What's funny about that is that Shaun's dad always complained about never getting any rain. In all of the 12 years I've known the man, he's never been satisfied with the amount of rain he's gotten. And today, the day we definitely needed to be outside for social distancing and fresh air, it just wouldn't stop.

So when we arrived at the funeral home a guy with an umbrella was waiting for us. He was not wearing a mask. We didn't yet have ours on, but he motioned for us to put the window down so he could give us instructions. He was a bit confusing, but I tried. Then he walked around the building to tell me to do something else. By this point, we'd masked. He was still not. I'd opened my car door AND HE LEANED IN to talk to Shaun about being in the front of the procession. We didn't want to. "But you know you're the son, right?" was his dumbass response. At this point I opened my umbrella on him and told him we know and that we still didn't want to.

Finally, we made it to the front of the funeral home and proceeded to get a thousand hugs, handshakes, and condolences. More people than we were expecting were masked, but a lot weren't, and of course there were those who had to wear the masks wrong. It wasn't better inside.

They let us in to make sure everything looked ok. It was fine. People milled about for an hour or so before the funeral director asked if we would prefer to use their chapel because of the rain. We said ok, since there were a lot of elderly people who probably didn't want to stand around in the mud and rain. Another hour passed. We watched the slideshow the funeral home made of photos. Shaun picked some excellent photos, btw. Then the service finally started.

The Army soldiers did their thing. No 21 gun salute since we were indoors, but they "played" Taps (faked it really badly on an instrument that clearly had a speaker in the horn part) and folded the flag shittily, according to Shaun. They presented him with the flag and then the preacher spoke. After that, we were "dismissed" to the church for food. We went to the church and watched the burial, then ordered a deep dish pizza and went home.

There was a lot of people and the absolute lack of social distance and masking has me really uncomfortable. Shaun and I are going to quarantine just in case. It's not like I need to do anything but study this week, anyway. If I don't get my head back on school I could really screw myself over this semester.

Also, I now have some potted plants that I don't know how to care for. And extra fun: Someone stole my good umbrella.

But it's over. The part I was most terrified of is over. If we made it through this without catching COVID I'll be amazed and thrilled. I guess time will tell.

I had nightmares about this funeral.

I had nightmares about this funeral. About people getting close to us (not social distancing), about me making a scene about that, about FIL being buried with a slain horse (because for whatever reason [in dreamland] Veterans get buried with horses), about his dead body being dead but somehow waking up and looking for deceased MIL (who for some reason in my dream was alive) to give her a kiss.

To be super clear I'm going solely to support my husbang. I personally do not give one shit about this sort of thing. Plus, pandemic and all that.

We're going to make sure the funeral home has everything setup ok and then we're going outside. Anyone who wants to offer condolences to us at the funeral home can do it outdoors.

The actual service will be graveside, which we did purposefully due to the pandemic. Since FIL was a Veteran they are folding a flag and handing it to the next-of-kin, which is Shaun. We'd planned to keep distance from the crowd, but it sounds like we need to be up front for that. At least it's outdoors.

The worst part is probably after, when everyone expects to come to the house and bring food. We don't want a bunch of people in the house that we are now responsible for. We asked FILs sister if she'd host and a few days ago and she said that was fine, but there is a ton of plastic dishes and cutlery in the house now, so we aren't sure if that's the plan at this point. If everyone is coming to the house we're responsible for, we feel a pressure to be there. If not, we can skip it. We can stay outside regardless, but we're honestly just not up for socializing after all of this.

Oh, and guess what? I have been excessively tired for days and felt feverish last night. It could be another round of PMS because my period didn't make it last week. I have an IUD so I'm thinking the lateness is caused by stress. But with as much as we've had to see people lately I can't pretend that despite our best efforts it is entirely possible I've caught the virus (or some other bug). Wonderful.

By the way, I apologize for not responding to everyone's comments (yet). I will. It's just been an insanely busy week and I'm running low on energy.

Hi, friends. We've had a rough few weeks around here.

Hi, friends.  We've had a rough few weeks around here.  We found out at the beginning of October that my father-in-law, Shaun's dad, had cancer in his lung.  He'd been feeling bad for quite a while before that, but we'd not received an official diagnosis prior.  Last week, another scan was done and cancer was also found in his rib.  He went from being able to get around to needing assistance extremely fast.  He spent some time in the hospital and was due for a PET scan this past Monday to determine what stage of cancer he had and what kind of treatment he would need.  Unfortunately, he never woke up for his appointment and Shaun found him passed away in his bed.

This has been an extremely difficult time for us.  Shaun and his family did an amazing job of caring for Uncle Jr., as they call him, and I am especially proud of how Shaun cared for his father with such compassion.

Below is the service information.  Feel free to share this, especially friends from the Munford / Talladega area, as I know he was a well-loved man.

Another private one.

Another private one.  The funeral home has already posted the obituary, so I'll be speaking freely soon.  I just wanted to let you all know how we are doing.

The last two days have been pretty terrible as far as emotions and workload go.  The emotions part is pretty self-explanatory.  Despite feeling relieved that he is no longer suffering FILs death is still a loss and a HUGE change.  Change is also scary and both mine and Shaun's anxiety has been through the roof.  These kinds of emotions are EXHAUSTING.  But that exhaustion did not negate the fact that we had to get a lot of things together for the funeral home and make sure that any valuables in the for-now empty (of people) house were secured.  Needless to say, we slept like rocks last night after two days of going so hard.

FILs house was clean and tidy except for dust and I wouldn't say that he was a hoarder, but OH MY GOSH, the amount of paperwork we had (and still have) to go through is INSANE.  We kept finding it everywhere.  We found (in two different places) 3 copies of stubs where he paid his life insurance premium, (but no contract), so we have no idea how much of the funeral cost that will cover.  I did call yesterday, but they won't give out the amount that the contract pays regardless of whether you have the account number or not.  I suppose that is a safe way to do things.

We searched for 2 days for the keys to the safe deposit box before we found them.  We thought that some of the things the funeral home needed might be in there so we didn't want to expend too much energy going through papers until we had that.  Turns out, there was only one helpful thing in it so we still had a lot of work to do.  We managed to get as much of it together as we could yesterday and went to the funeral home to make preparations.  I don't know if this would be considered a cop-out, but the funeral home director had looked up what Shaun's father chose for his mom, so we went with a matching casket and all that.  The only thing we did differently was the memorabilia thing which he didn't do for Shaun's mother (and later regretted).

We need to get some more photos to the funeral home, but other than that I think we've done what we can do.  The funeral is on Saturday because the pastor that FIL wanted has doctor appointments on Thursday and Friday.  That will give any out-of-town relatives time to get here, anyway.  We chose a graveside service unlike what Shaun's mother had due to COVID.  Maybe these older conservative types don't care about catching a virus, but we're not going to endanger them any more than is necessary.  Since he's a Veteran, there will be a 21 gun salute, which I've never seen IRL before, so that will be neat.

All in all I think that aside from the actual funeral we are past the hardest part.  The will left everything to Shaun since he is the only child so that is pretty straightforward, although both executors have passed away which might complicate things.  I think we'll probably end up needing to get a lawyer to help us navigate all of the upcoming paperwork, but I don't know.  This is uncharted territory for us.  I foresee a lot of paperwork and paperwork-sorting-through and phone calls in our near future.  Super fun times.  /sarcasm

Other than that I have basically neglected school for the last 3 weeks and I have an exam coming up on Tuesday.  I'm going to email my professor and ask if I can take my exam on the following Friday because an extra few days would help me a lot and I really need some time to catch up.  I've attended every online lecture, but I haven't done a lick of homework because of, well, everything.  I am hoping that she will have mercy on me.

The silver lining to all of this is that I am sure that Shaun and I can survive anything together.  We've been though a lot of hard things in our 12 years as a couple, but this is probably our biggest team-work type of challenge in all of that time.  We were pushed to our emotional edges and to physical exhaustion simultaneously over the last two days and aside from being just SLIGHTLY short with each other a few times, we've gotten a lot done and have propped each other up in a big way.  I never doubted us, but it feels nice to pass a test with flying colors.

P. S.

Death is going to happen to all of us.  After us finding paperwork everywhere and having to sort through it all, we 100% are going to make a "Shit, I Died" binder for the kids.  It's going to have all relevant paperwork and info for them so that we don't put them through more stress when we pass away.  I'm sure (or at least I hope) that most people have a filing cabinet or some type of organization system in place in their home, but if you do not, please, for the sake of your loved ones get it in some kind of order.  We didn't know the name of his life insurance company and still don't know how much of the funeral cost will be covered.  We don't know if he had more than one life insurance policy, or burial insurance, or the location of anything that would let us know.  We just have two boxes of mixed papers that we're going to have to sort through to make sure we don't miss anything helpful or important, and it should have been relatively easy for it not to be that way.  Please don't put your loved ones though more stress at a very hard time in life.  Please let your final act of love towards them be that you took care of them during your loss.