Boise Questival 2017

My friends and I are doing the Boise 2017 Questival this weekend.  SO MUCH FUN!  There are over 200 tasks.  Here's a few examples. More to follow. Here's the Questival URL:
https://www.cotopaxi.com/products/questival-boise-2017

Hiking April Bowl

The day after Mom's memorial was gorgeous out.  We packed up lunches and drive up Hatcher's Pass to the trailhead to April Bowl.  It is a place we all have been many many times.  The top of the hike is high up to a lake in a bowl shaped basin that makes the most incredible acoustics.  God's amphitheater.  You can hear a conversation from two hundred yards away.  We brought guitars.  Todd brought letters that the social worker from Heart 'n Home had transposed for Mom while she talked.  One personalized letter for each of her children.  We each opened our letters and read them to ourselves.  We played songs as tribute to her.  We said farewell in a place that always felt like home.

Mom's Funeral and Memorial

Tuesday, July 12th:

In the morning when I got up to get ready for the funeral, I first looked at my phone which showed that I had received an alert from AK Airlines.  I read the alert- it was a reminder that I had a flight in 4 hours.  4 hours from now, I would be speaking at my mother's funeral.  I went to my e-mail and sure enough, the Alaska Airlines agent I had on the phone booked my family's flights a day early- ON mom's funeral day.  The other flights for Scott, Levi, and Marty were booked on the right day.  This was HER fault.  But when I called the airline, they would do me no favors because, in their defense, they emailed me the confirmation and I should have double checked it.  I had to pay all the increased fees of the cost of a ticket purchased only one day in advance plus change fees.  AND the flight we originally asked for no longer had 5 seats left for us.  We would have to split up on several flights or have a longer layover and arrive in Alaska later.  It was less ideal, but we had to get there.  This bad news, after losing a full hour of our morning to get ready. 

We scrambled.  We barely made it on time, but we did.  We just didn't get to eat anything for breakfast. 

Her funeral was beautiful.  The pictures Sara and Stephanie had printed and hung from scalloping strings across the walls in the foyer and in the gym where the meal would be.  They had to have gotten up SO early in the morning to do all that they did.  It was stunning.  And it was so fun to see so many memories of her- especially in that setting of loved ones who lived far away from her for so many years and didn't get to see those events.   I choked up a couple of times at the end.  But I thought I would have sobbed through the whole thing and felt extra strength beyond my own to be composed up there.  Devan, my aunt Diana, and my uncle Randy all spoke wonderfully as well.  My uncle lost his wife 7 years before and he spoke directly to my dad at one part that was so touching.  He said we don't know why they had to leave us so early.  But that he has learned that he had been so well taken care of before that it's been a lesson he needed to learn to take care of himself and be self-sufficient.  He told him he's not going to feel like he's going to be OK.  But that in the end, he's going to be OK.  Diana also called my mom their angel.  The only blond in their family and always so sweet.  The caboose, being the youngest. 

I hate that it takes a funeral to gather so many of the people you love in one place.  But it was wonderful to see them all and catch up.  Mom had SO many people there.  It filled the chapel and the overflow and into the room behind it.  People were standing in the foyer outside it.  People came from California, Iowa, Nevada, Idaho, Southern Utah.  People that had moved from Alaska to somewhere else long ago and wanted to attend because she left a mark on their life.  There was a young mother there who Mom had in Young Womens in Alaska years ago.  She came and said it was my mom that made her want to serve a mission.  My mom gave her the confidence to pull out of a depression and be who she was meant to be. 

And that was all just the Salt Lake funeral.  I would feel successful if all I had at my funeral was the attendance she had at that one.  But she had just as many in attendance in Alaska. 

After the funeral, we told my family what had happened with the airlines.  Levi was infuriated.  He has several hundred thousand followers on his Instagram which he claimed was powerful advertising for good or for bad.  He said one bad review from him and the airline would quickly correct it.  He made a statement about Alaska Airlines taking advantage of the grieving and within 15 minutes they contacted him offering to wave all of the fees.  We accepted.  Wow.  What do I have to do to get 300,000 followers!???  Except I'm kind of big on not caring about followers or attention.

We drove to Sandy to the burial site where we each laid a rose on Mom's grave.  Dad dedicated Mom's grave with such poise and poetic language.  He looked like a pretty broken man at all other times.  My Fruitland friends and high school friends also attended the burial.  They may never know how much that meant to me.  When it ended we attended a luncheon back at the Rose Park Chapel where the funeral was held. We spent the rest of the day at Devan and Maura's with Dad and my brothers and sisters. 

My amazing high school besties.

Lainey with her two friends from Fruitland.

Mom was buried very close to her parent and baby brother.  Also very close to the Christos statue. 

Wednesday, July 13th:

While we flew to Alaska, I read a book that a lady had recommended.  She had known my parents in Alaska.  Her husband had died and she moved to Boise to be closer to family.  She was paraplegic and drove herself in a van with hand has/brakes and a remote lift out the back.  She made us a delicious dinner and came to see Mom.  Mom was comatose at this point, being very near the end.  But she recommended this book that a man she personally knew wrote about his journey to the afterlife and back when he was in a coma in the hospital.  She said it had a beautiful message and she completely endorsed the author's integrity.  So I ordered one for Dad and one for me.  Dad read it the day mom passed away, surely to help distract himself from pain.

It worked.  Remarkably actually, for me.  I was beginning to come to terms with the fact that I was traumatized.  The images of Mom in such a suffering and crippled state haunted me.  I was scared that I would always remember her that way and not the way she was when she was healthy and beautiful.  To read a book took away the pain for a time.  And to read a book about the afterlife made me picture her there as a perfect, whole, glorified version of her.  It healed my mind and heart.  And it was so uplifting to place my focus on the goal of Heaven and plan of Exaltation.  I finished the book as the flight was landing.

We waited at baggage claim forever for our last two bags.  They never came. We went to baggage claim and sure enough they had been lost, found, and would arrive in two hours.  They promised to deliver them for free at that time.  We were staying with my mom and dad's very best friends, the Pettijohns.  I waited up until past the 1:00 estimated delivery time but it never came.  I called and the office was closed until 7:00am.  Another short night before a funeral.  At 7:00 on the dot I called and they said the luggage was on it's way, should be there in an hour.  It wasn't.  Nor the next hour or the next.  The funeral was at 11:00 and my two daughters' funeral clothes were in this luggage.  Every time I called the airline, they said it was on its way.  It was too late.  We had to leave.  I couldn't miss the funeral.  Some friends with daughters my daughters' age loaned them dresses to change into at the church.  In the meantime, I had changed the delivery address to the church's address and waited out in the parking lot.  I missed the chance to talk to many of the people inside before the funeral because of this.  Suddenly, and shockingly, one of my best friends from Fruitland, Idaho, with her husband, began to walk up the sidewalk from their parked car.  The tears came instantly.  She hugged me tight and I needed it.  I needed her there and I didn't  know it until that moment.  I needed her hug.  Her husband is from Alaska as well, Wasilla of all places.  And they had planned a family trip there that very week.  So being in town, they took a few hours of their Alaska vacation to attend my mother's funeral.  Her husband offered to wait in the parking lot for the luggage so I could go in and take part in the family prayer.  Again, Heaven sent.

The luggage never came and eventually John came inside to attend the funeral.  My girls looked OK.  I did fine on my talk, again, feeling sustained beyond my ability.  Mom had a lot of people there from all walks of life and various faiths.  She really had no biased to who she loved and influenced for good.  Ginger, her best friend spoke and did a phenomenal job.  She really knew and loved her.  Levi spoke and tugged at all of our hearts as he told his story of how Mom made all the difference in his life with unwavering love while having unchanging beliefs and he thanked her for both.  I loved visiting with Melissa, a friend I haven't seen since childhood who, like so many say, said the happiest she remembers feeling was back in the days she was often in my mother's home when we were good friends.  She loved my mom.  My mom loved her.  She really did. She loved all of my friends, truly.

After the funeral, we found the luggage at the Pettijohns.  The delivery truck had left to be delivered like they said first thing this morning.  But it also had to deliver other pieces of luggage to towns as far as 2 hours away.  And it started with them first.  All the stops and distance and out-of-range reception meant it didn't get there in time.  You would think funeral clothes for you own Mother's funeral would trigger an urgent response in that service.  I made sure from the moment we reported a missing bag that they were aware. But... I called Alaska Airlines AGAIN.  I told them this was my MOTHER'S funeral.  I repeated the kind of service I had received in only 3 short days!  They gave us several free flights worth of skymiles.

My childhood friend, Melissa.

Our very good Fruitland friends who came.

 
Back home, flowers were everywhere.  And brownies were everywhere - leftovers from the kind members who served us a luncheon.

The family spent the evening up at the family cabin.  It was an incredibly gorgeous Alaskan summer day.  The Pettijohns and Kaleb and Amy Cassidy also joined us with their family.   There was a bit of an empty or defeated feeling there.  She didn't get see it finished.  It was no longer her baby.

These pictures below.  were taken a few weeks later when April passed through Salt Lake while on a trip with her friend's family.  They met up to see Mom's temporary gravestone plaque.  The nice permanent granite stones take 4 months to be made and installed.  They said that when they arrived it had been lightly sprinkling out but stopped as the walked to Mom's grave.  Suddenly they saw a beautiful rainbow.  On cue and without knowing my Mom had just showed the song and video to April a few days before she died, the friend's mom began singing, "If I Could Build You a Rainbow".  April immediately recognized it as the song Mom and Dad had showed her.  A song about a little boy's mom singing to him before she died of a terminal illness.  It was pretty special for those who were there.  It is remarkable how Mom is telling each of her children that she is still there, each in their own way.