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19 November

...from the funeral experience. You might call it a funeral post-mortem (haha, little gallows-humor there for you nerdy types)

Thus far it's been hard to muster much gusto for the day-to-day business of home-life. Elliott's running a little bit of a fever, I've put regular Adderall-usage on hiatus and extended feelers out for a database engineer job over at Zune. I didn't get the tester position I originally applied for over there, but I'm not devastated. I did as much as I could to prepare and give the best nterview I could, but it just wasn't in the cards for me this time. No big deal.

In the spirit of continuing to masquerade as a blog having some marginal life-utility, in no particular order, I have these thoughts on the week that was (last week):

1. When you're trying to organize a funeral, lots of people will offer to help ("if there is anything I can do...") If I could go back into time, I would've taken-up on more on peoples' offers to help. Maybe not even funeral-specific stuff, but even stuff like watching the kids for a few hours now and again would've been tremendously helpful.

2. It's probably smart to make someone the central point of contact to coordinate and organize all the efforts; a person to manage other people who order flowers, order death certificates, talk to banks/state about probate issues, organize the program and get copies printed, manage photo collages and prints for the proceedings, talk to pastors, get the word out to the right invitees, handle travel-stuff for family/friends, etc...

3. Between doing stuff, talking to people and generally being physically/spiritually/emotionally spent, it's a good idea to write everything down and verify it back to people you're talking to. My sister and I both got the locale of my dad's viewing wrong and a lot of his close friends never made it.

4. Before you die, if you expect to handle the funeral expenses yourself (and you really should, unless you are a colossal douche) make sure that the funds are readily available to the person(s) who are in charge. My sis and I always thought things were set but while he was alive, it was never comfortable asking/talking my dad about his funeral and we ended up having to jump through a lot more hoops than anticipated to get things paid for.

5. For the euology-writing, if you're having a Christian funeral, apparently there's no need to worry about this since the minister crafts the end-to-end memorial service (according to Karen) If you're having a pagan-style funeral, a few tips that I found useful:

plan for about 120-150 words per minute when you think about length.
writing for something that'll be read on the page is different than writing for something that'll be spoken. It helps to try your handiwork out loud to see how it rolls off the tongue or if it's easy enough to follow when spoken.
If you have a lot of anecdotes to include, you can't spend too much time setting up or elaborating. I think you need to efficiently set the point/idea up and deliver the story. I had tons of stuff I wanted to share but couldn't b/c I was on top of 1500 words (the 10 minute mark) before I knew it.
it's good writing advice in any context, but think a lot about your audience. I was writing to like, 95% 1st-generation Chinese (though mostly college-educated) so I had to axe a lot of the more flowery prose in favor of to-the-point and easier-to-follow.
Tone-wise, try to stay conscious of whether you're shooting for more nostalgic or cathartic. Both will be in there in one form or another but wherever you're going with your eulogy, you're taking an audience with you so it helps to have a defined overall direction.

6. When I'm emotionally-stressed, I have a trigger-happy anger/lash-out reflex and I would guess most other folks do too. It's helpful to de-stress when you can and consciously try to be extra patient and calm and even-keeled when you know this stuff is going on.

7. Invite a friend or two of your own. It was oddly comforting to have Hoon & Mimi in attendance because even though they live in MD now, it felt like part of my extended Seattle life/family/existence was there supporting me.

16:29 | Blog it | Miscellaneous

Comments (1)

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Mimi wrote:

very good advice indeed.
i'm glad our presence was a small comfort to you and Karen. wish we could've done more. . . .
your father was an amazing man, everyone in the room could've testified to that.
sorry we're not close by in seattle so we can continue to support you. and it was good having you worship with us on sunday too. now you've seen what my new church home is like.

take care. hope elliot gets better soon.

23 Nov.

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