Funeral prep

Mom's funeral is tomorrow morning. I think everything is ready. I hope so as a number of friends and neighbors told me they plan to attend.

I haven't seen mom's body since the hospital, and won't until just before the funeral service, so I hope all is right with her look. I gave the funeral home several photos so they can do her hair right.

Her brothers are sending flowers so that should be covered.

I had a basic obituary put in the local newspaper and one will be run in the county newspaper where she was born and grew up. I did a basic obituary since that stuff seems to also be put online these days. I know, I write a blog, what's my concern about stuff being online? I think it is that I want control of the info and would rather be vague than posting a detailed life history of mom online.

I did find some photos of mom which was no easy task. As the family's photo taker for many years she wasn't in many photos. And she didn't like her photo taken. And my brother and I couldn't find almost twenty years of photos as they are in a box somewhere and not in photo albums.

With the photos we found, and some documents, I was able to determine some dates for an obituary-like writeup in the funeral service folder. I knew some important events in mom's life but was fuzzy on the exact dates. I don't know the years she worked as an RN as Trinity Hospital does not keep employee data very long. For retirement and those benefits, apparently the hospital keeps the info for a while, but apparently for not very long when an employee quits. They had no data prior to the 1980s. You'd think the hospital would at least keep a simple record of every employee they every had and their date of employment?

My good friend, Rod, has a desktop publishing computer program and he helped me with the layout and printing of the funeral service's folder. He also helped me select a few poems for the folder. He went above and beyond the call of duty as while we started after 9 pm, we did not finish until 4 am.

But I think the folder is nice. I was able personalize it more and have it be several sheets of paper. This is more than what I believe was available from the funeral home.

After getting to bed after 4 am I then finally met, at 11 am on Saturday, the Reverend that will do the funeral service, and we went over the psalms and music for the service.

So here goes...