April 3, 2000

Whew; what an exhausting weekend. Back to back days of driving 500 km along boring (very boring) stretches of highways 401 and 416 bookended the fatherly celebrations. The hotel was really nice; we got a very reduced rate and a free room upgrade owing to it being the quiet time of year. $99 for a suite - can't go wrong with that! Mom came up on the bus on Friday and crashed on the futon in the office that night before we drove up on Saturday morning. One of the bonking girls upstairs woke her up at 1:30am with her, er, boisterous necking. Mom didn't get much sleep Friday, both from that interruption and from having butterflies about attending the ceremony on Saturday. She and Dad's wife don't see eye to eye on many things due to certain past events, so she was feeling nervous about going. However, she wanted to be there for my sister and me, so she bore down and made it through relatively unscathed.

That to the left is a bookmark that was given out to everyone at the wake (life celebration? shindig for the recently deceased?) It was accompanied by a memorial card:

The ceremony itself was.. interesting. There was a cousin of Dad's wife who is an established opera singer; she sang 2 pieces, a rather morbid sounding opera song which I tuned out (not being a devotee of the genre) and Stephen Sondheim's Send In The Clowns, which she sang beautifully. This was followed by a number of mostly short speeches by people whom I've never met before in my life, all of whom referred to Dad in the time context of post-1982, or the 3rd wife period. Only reference to anything before that time was a single mention of my sister's name in passing. Hello?! There were people in his life before then - 2 wives and 4 sons worth to start, with nary a mention.

Regardless, in the context that it was presented, I thought it was done fairly well. It just suffered from narrow focus on the last 18 years of his life.

See you on the other side, Dad.

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