I went to my sister-in-law’s funeral on Thursday in the southeastern part of Missouri. My sister-in-law came from a large family–she was one of nine–and a number of them made the trip down from Wisconsin and various parts of Missouri to attend.<\/p>\n
Apparently, the family agreed beforehand to wear Packers apparel to honor my sister-in-law’s love of the team. I kid you not. We had jerseys at the service representing:<\/p>\n
Along with assorted other Packers apparel amongst the children and whatnot.<\/p>\n
I was the only one in a suit, which prompted one of her sisters to ask “Where’s Jake?” when I arrived in my fedora and sunglasses. I’ll be honest, I’m almost fifty, and I’m still a bit gobsmacked when a stranger makes a joke about how I’m dressed. Don’t get me wrong; I will make jokes about how I am dressed–I told someone that I sat down during the viewing period before the service because I didn’t want to be mistaken for a funeral home employee, especially as I would ask for tips, and that would be gauche at a time like this (and I was actually mistaken for an employee by a member of my sister-in-law’s family). Eesh, I got a bunch of jokes to put me down in my school years decades ago, and they still put me in a bit of a mental defensive crouch when I get them now.<\/p>\n
My brother is doing all right; he’s talking about the future and has gotten another dog, which his wife opposed, so he’s looking past his grief. My nephew has been hit a little harder; this was his mother and quite possibly the first death of someone close to him, so he didn’t have any warm-ups.<\/p>\n
It’s been a rough couple of weeks for all of us, them more than me, of course. I would say I’m looking forward to getting back to normal, but deaths close to home have a way of making one look at normal and wondering if it’s really the normal one wants.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I went to my sister-in-law’s funeral on Thursday in the southeastern part of Missouri. My sister-in-law came from a large family–she was one of nine–and a number of them made the trip down from Wisconsin and various parts of Missouri to attend. Apparently, the family agreed beforehand to wear Packers apparel to honor my sister-in-law’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3334,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26783","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26783","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3334"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26783"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26783\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26785,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26783\/revisions\/26785"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26783"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26783"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26783"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}