The arrangements seem endless sometimes, but they're proceeding. The funeral home folks have been wonderful. They hosted a "visitation" Tuesday night; we stood around for a couple hours shaking hands and talking to people in low voices. A good many people came by to pay respects and convey sympathies, and just talk about tf-mom, and what she'd meant to them. It was hard, but it was good.

Her two sisters arrived from out of town Tuesday, and the one from the local city as well. And iGrrrl, whose presence was a godsend.^*

I met a great many people from tf's childhood and school years. I'd met some of them before, at her grandfather's funeral last spring. There are some good contacts there, and we should keep in touch with a few of them.

There was a little table on which we placed some flowers (there were a great many other arrangements donated), her ashes, her nurse's cap, and a picture taken January 1 of tf-mom, her four children, and the dog. Pediatric nursing was, in many ways, her life, even before she became an RN, what with raising four energetic kids, mostly by herself.

The funeral home also has a service where they'll take a dozen or two pictures the family supplies, and makes a DVD slide show out of them. So Sunday night we sorted through tf-mom's pictures, and those family pictures (largely from the weddings the last few years) on people's laptops, and agreed on a set. The result is really very sweet, and we ordered a copy for each household.

The funeral itself was Wednesday morning, and was very much what tf-mom had said she wanted. We buried her ashes next to her mother's grave, in the family plot.

The dividing up of the stuff in the house has begun. There was a fair amount of stuff left from the estate of the grandfather, who passed away last spring. That was a bit less raw than tf-mom's stuff, so they started there, and went on to long-filled storage closets. The piano is getting a new home, though it took a scouring of most of eastern NC to find a suitable truck for a reasonable amount of money. So far, at least, the siblings are pulling together, settling things amicably. I'm most impressed.

I left the house January 7. A colleague in the same town has been stopping by a couple times a week to feed the cat and check on the mail, forwarding bills and such. A neighbor with a new snow-blower was kind enough to work on the sidewalks. I hope the cat box isn't so icky that Silas will have abandoned it. The cat-sitter is a cat person, though, so if it got bad, he may well have cleaned it unasked.

And of course toxicfur has been gone longer. We left Christmas Day for a vacation in Colorado with my folks. She flew directly from there to NC December 28 and has been there ever since. She will have been gone a bit over six weeks when she returns, mid-week.

And time flies. Easter is early this year, so I was gone for essentially the entire liturgical season of Epiphany. I sang Jan 6 in the morning for the Epiphany mass. This coming Wednesday is Ash Wednesday already, when Lent begins.

It'll be good to get back to real life. Though next to what's happened here this past month, what passes for real in our lives seems kind of pale.

Edited to add: tf-brother & s-i-l P and A are on their way to the hospital, as A has gone into labor. So, later today, the tally of family members will, God willing, be back to what it was. She was due Monday last, so she's really ready.

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^*Did you know there's a Holiday Inn in $town? And it has free WiFi!