Posts from Thursday, June 12th, 2014

Funeral Service

Published 9 years, 9 months past

The funeral service for Rebecca is this afternoon at 3:00pm EDT (GMT-0400) at Anshe Chesed Fairmount Temple in Beachwood, Ohio.  If you can be and wish to be there in person, please come.  Even if we don’t know each other very well, you are welcome.  There will be enough room.

If you can’t be there but want to be a part of the service, there is a live stream planned, as there is for most events in the temple’s main sanctuary; it will be available at the Fairmount Temple’s livestream page.  It even looks as though the service will be available on demand later, which horrifies me almost as much as the countdown clock.  Even though I understand why these things exist, and why they are as they are, I broke down for a while at both.  This is what I helped to build, what I helped make happen, I thought in despair, as if my work on the Web had somehow led to my daughter’s death.

The mind makes little enough sense in the best of circumstances.  In the depths of grief, it deploys an illogic that defies belief, let alone reason.

I talked with the video hosting company about possible demand, a conversation which was horrifying in its own right.  They assure me that they should be able to handle any load.  Still, I make this request: if you are planning to watch the livestream, please access it early only if we know each other personally — family members, friends, and so on.  Just click on the logo 15 minutes or so before the start time to get the spinning circle, and wait for the stream to start.  If you don’t know me that well, please wait until just before the start time before getting into the queue.

I may be wildly overestimating the demand for watching a funeral in real time, but then I would never have expected the social-media campaigns currently underway.  I probably should have anticipated them, but I had never really thought much about what would happen after she died.  I was too focused on trying to find a way for her to live, and then on making her final days the best we could make them.

I can write all this now, in the small hours of the night and scheduling publication for the morning, because I’m currently in a shock/denial period.  Today was mostly grief, but eventually the grief drains you to the point that you just slide into numb shock.  Then something triggers you back into the grief for a while.  There were a lot of triggers today.

It’s still so hard to believe.  The enormity of it, and the closeness of it, makes it almost impossible to grasp.  My mind keeps insisting that she’s just away at camp, or asleep in her room.  Not gone forever.  Never that.  Not until I suddenly remember the cold, empty truth of it.

I miss her so much.


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