Photos From A Life

I've been collecting photos of David and arranging them on a poster for the funeral on Thursday.  He and my mom had been married for sixteen years.  They married when he was 73 and she was 70.  My father died six years earlier and David had been single for twenty years.  They knew each other from church.

There are some photos from their wedding on the poster.  They were married in the back yard, with the family and friends from church in attendance.  After they were married, he made her breakfast every morning and brought her red roses for the table every week.  Whenever we had a family dinner he made a big fruit salad.

They enjoyed traveling together.  They went to Hawaii, Alaska, Israel and the Panama Canal.

Between the two of them, they had six children, six grandchildren, and six great-grandchildren.  (The generations in our family do not expand exponentially, do they?)  He was a wonderful grandfather to them all, the type who got down on the floor to play with them.

David was an officer in the Navy and served on an aircraft carrier in World War Two.  We have arranged for an honor guard and a military grave marker.

Two of my sisters and I met Mom yesterday at the funeral home.  We were there for three hours.  We wrote the obituary, chose the casket and vault, and worked out all the other details that had to be decided for a funeral and burial.  Mom is doing okay; she gets a little overwhelmed by all the details but she has a lot of help from family and neighbors and people from her church, so she is going to be all right.  She was very lucky to be with him for sixteen years.  One of the last times when Mom visited him at the hospice, Dave couldn't speak but he smiled when she sang "Jesus Loves You" and "Amazing Grace".  Soon after that, he died peacefully in his sleep.