Hardest Days

It's been the hardest days of my life. On Wednesday we planned the funeral. On Thursday we saw his body and met with the funeral director. As we met with the funeral director, my dad held my hand so tightly I thought my hand might break. When I walked with mom and dad to see Matt's body, I'm pretty certain my heart did break. My mom kept crying, "That's my baby! That's my baby!"

When thinking of caskets, we knew that Matt would be cremated. The options were to rent a casket for the funeral for $1,800 or to buy a cardboard casket for $485. The cardboard caskets are actually quite nice. But as we were talking about it, my dad squeezed my hand even harder, and I looked over and tears were streaming down his cheeks. I said, "Dad, do you want to say something?" and he said through tears, "My son deserves better than a cardboard box." 

The rented casket it was.

It was a lot for me to carry on my own. I needed my sisters to get there- and finally, Michelle did get there that night. What a relief!

We each had our "hard" to bear. Mine was to be with mom and dad for those first 48 hours. The grief and sorrow are too much for any of us to bear alone! But being there was emotionally really, really hard. Necessary, but hard. Michelle, though, was in charge of the eulogy. And she basically wrote the obituary as well. That was another impossible task. Melissa and Stephanie went to mom and dad's and went through all the photo albums and put together a slide show. That was also incredibly difficult with a lot of tears.

So many tears.

It's all just impossible and unfathomable.