tomorrow

Most or all of us guys will be at the church around 8AM tomorrow, even though the service starts at 10. I've heard that a Korean contingent will be arriving with finger food around 9:30 (so that they can set up in time for the reception, which will occur immediately after the memorial service). Members of the congregation are also bringing food, so in true Presbyterian fashion, no one will be going hungry.

We've been busy all day today. Sean practiced at home, went into DC to pick up the violinist, and had an 8:30PM rehearsal at the church. He won't be speaking; his music will speak for him. David's writing his eulogy, and has been out on various errands, including picking up his suit from the tailor's. I had to do that as well; the tailor told me today that he saw the news about Mom in a local Korean-language paper. Perhaps he'll show up at the memorial service tomorrow morning.

Dad and I are each toiling away-- Dad on his eulogy, and I on my albatross, the PowerPoint presentation. At some point, I'm probably going to have to throw in the towel and declare the job finished, whether it actually is or not. The amount of scanning we've done (I had a huge amount of help from David) is larger than any scanning task I've done before. It's been complicated by the fact that, at 300dpi, the images show dust motes all over them, which has forced me to spend long minutes using Photoshop to clean up every single picture. Minutes easily snowball into hours. On top of all that, I still haven't gotten beyond two paragraphs on my own eulogy, and am thinking that, since I'll be speaking for only five minutes, I might just carry some notes up to the lectern with me. I've started and deleted the eulogy text too many times to count, so perhaps this is a hint that I need to stop holding on to the notion of a scripted talk.

We're all tired and stressed, but we're chugging away. As you might imagine, we're just looking for Saturday to be over. I don't mean that as a slight to anyone-- certainly not to our relatives, who have all taken the trouble to come up from Texas for a single night and morning; nor to Mom's many friends, who will be attending the memorial service; nor to the hardworking people who have been helping us put the service together. I guess I'm just saying that we guys are all exhausted, sad, and just hoping for a bit of a breather.

The very next day, Sunday the 17th, is Dad's birthday. We'll likely be treating him to a nice meal somewhere in town; I can only imagine that, for Dad, occasions like birthdays and anniversaries shouldn't be celebrated alone. At the very least, we sons should do our best to offer him our presence and companionship. We did it for Mom; we can and should do it for Dad, too.


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