07/10/2013

   Unfortunately, by this time in our lives, both my wife and I had experienced dealing with mortuaries many times over the years, first in supporting roles as we lost loved ones as we were growing up, and more recently when we had more direct responsibilities for the arrangements. We had both experienced the loss of friends, uncles, aunts, cousins, grandparents, brothers, parents-but nothing prepared us to lose our child. All those other deaths all rolled into one did not come close to having the devastating emotional impact of losing our son. We knew of a couple of mortuary facilities in our area and decided to call the one closest to us. We had to look up the number in the yellow pages. As I turned the pages, I still could not believe we were actually doing this. It would, in fact, be a long time before any of this would soak in as being real. For now, and through all of the next several days, it just seemed as if we were planning and hosting a huge event for our son-not unlike previous times in his life we had planned a celebration of one kind or another. When things were all over surely our son would be coming back home. Crazy thinking. I guess it's the brain's way of helping you deal with something that is too horrible to actually handle in reality. We scheduled an appointment for later that morning. What to do until then?