I am all over the place this morning. It doesn’t happen very often, but today I completely scrapped what I initially wrote and started over. It was an emotionally and physically draining weekend with the funeral of my father-in-law Frank. I think part of my indecisiveness this morning has to do with the juxtaposition of feelings that multiple people have. I will try to explain.

Before the service, my wife was saying that she was feeling light headed and feint. This was after waking up with a headache and an upset stomach. I felt it was anxiety which she denied it but I know but having had all those symptoms related to anxiety myself, I am almost sure of it. Things calmed down a bit as we readied to get to the funeral home and arranged all of the memorabilia and prepared for the service, until my mother-in-law showed up.

She was a wreck, I had never seen her so despondent. She couldn’t walk without two people’s help, she couldn’t breathe, I don’t think that she was even aware of what was going on around her during the service. That was definitely anxiety. We weren’t even sure if my brother-in-law Juaquin was going to attend the service and he wasn’t on the docket to speak but he did. I don’t want to diverge too much, however there has been lots of strain between my brother-in-law and the rest of the family including my mother.

When I spoke to my wife August 13, I told her that after a prayer for the family, it was on my heart to try and reconcile with Juaquin. I knew that I wasn’t living my values by trying to block out my brother-in-law. As Frank was the family peacekeeper he was the one that always looked after his son and he would want that if at all possible. I decided that I would try to apologize and see if we could move past our differences but had not had a chance to do so yet.

As was customary for Juaquin, he wanted to have the last word and inserted himself into the program after all of the eulogy was completed while the service was in progress. He spoke the truth. The truth was that Frank did not have any desire for a bunch of fuss of a funeral. It was an angry kind of Malcolm-X like tone, nevertheless it was true. What was also true was that my wife also spoke truth. She spoke the words ‘were you hungry?’, ‘were you cold?’, ‘what do you need?’. This funeral was not for Frank, this was for his wife to appease the guilt of his death, it was for his family and friends to see him one more time.

There is still a lot of hurt and hangups here. There is misplaced blame of why and where and all that. Trust me, there is much more to the back story than I have relayed, but it is personal and inappropriate for me to write about. Unfortunately, all the plans post the funeral were changed because it was just too raw for some and we needed to spend time on healing. With that, we spent most of yesterday cleaning up and delivering leftover flowers to people that had attempted to help the family post the funeral.

End Your Programming Routine: I did say that I was sorry to Juaquin for the past and that I would like to move forward. He accepted it lukewarmly, I think that was about the best I could hope for and didn’t leave a lot of room for more than that. At least I can say that I will try to be more empathetic and look through his eyes before judgement and typecasting.