ICYMI (or, if you're over 25, “in case you missed it”)

As many of you know, we had Vic's celebration of life on August 7. Boulder County held a parade in his honor (although it looked a lot like the Boulder County Fair parade, so I'm thinking that, in an effort to save costs, they just had both on the same day), which made traffic and parking a nightmare, and yet more than a hundred people showed up. I was overwhelmed with gratitude, and my heart was full.

However, many of our friends and family were unable to attend. Many live too far away. Others are battling challenges of their own. Some had unchangeable plans. And as I told all of them, Vic wouldn't have wanted anyone to disrupt their lives for him—even for only an hour.

Many of you asked if I could send you the slide show. I'll go one better—I'll give you the service! (If you just want the slide shows, ignore all the words and go straight for the pictures—no judgment here!)

First up, the opening slide show. This is the slide show that was playing as people walked in and waited for the service to start comprising pictures taken by Vic, primarily scenics. I added in pictures of all our pets and fosters at the end because I ran out of room in the in-service slide show, and Vic would have wanted them somewhere—and he did take all of them, so technically they belong. 😉 As for the music, well, Vic picked it himself. (We are very practical people.) Enjoy this selection of songs:

• A Time for Us by Andy Williams
• Wishing You Were Somehow Here Again from Phantom of the Opera by Andrew Lloyd Webber
• Time in a Bottle by Jim Croce
• How Long Will I Love You from the movie About Time, by Jon Boden, Sam Sweeney and Ben Coleman
• Matthew by John Denver (This was Vic's song for his son, Bryan—and although the song is about an uncle, the line “was his father's only boy” resonated with Vic, and then if you listen to the rest of the song through that lens, it's quite lovely.)
• Turn Around by Nanci Griffith (This was Vic's song for his daughter, Laurie. I dare you not to cry when you listen to this song.)
• For You by John Denver (This was one of many of Vic's songs for me and epitomizes how he felt about me. I dare myself not to cry just thinking about listening to this song. 😌)
  

Note: This video is just a skosh over 20 minutes long, so make sure you're in a comfortable chair.

I know sometimes people can't see the videos that are embedded in my blog, so here's a link to the video on YouTube: Opening Slide Show

Next we played a bit of elk bugling to transition into the service, and although I am not able to upload the exact audio file we used, I did find an audio file of elk bugling on the National Park Service's website.

I opened the service:

Good morning. I hope you enjoyed the elk bugling you just heard. Vic picked it because it was one of his favorite sounds, along with honking geese and the Sandhill cranes in Nebraska. On behalf of Laurie, Bryan, Patty, Alice and all of our families, thank you all so much for coming. Vic always said no one would attend his funeral, and I always said the doors would be bursting at the seams, so I appreciate you for helping me win this one last marital spat.

When my mom died last year without a will, we set about updating ours. One of the documents our lawyer had us prepare was a called a disposition document: do you want to be an organ donor, do you want to be cremated … do you want to have a memorial service. As Vic was talking to the lawyer, he mentioned that he didn’t want to have a service, and I said, “Oh, you’re having a service.” And he said, “I thought this was supposed to be about what I wanted.” And I said, “Oh, you want a service.” I had to remind him that funerals are for the living, and despite the fact that he was sure no one would show up, I knew better. So told him he was having a service—but I promised him it would be a service that he would approve of, which means short, sweet and to the point. No meltdowns. No 20-minute slideshows of him in the middle. No maudlin songs that would make everybody cry.

So, let’s get started. First up, Vic’s sister Alice, who’s going to tell us a little bit about her big brother.

Alice had been concerned that she wouldn't be able to get through her eulogy without crying, but she was a champ. Here's what she said:

We are here today to celebrate the life of my big brother, Victor Love. Vic, my sister Patty LaBriola, and I shared the same mother, Lucille Dawson. My father, Dave Dawson, was Vic’s everyday Dad too. Vic was 8½ years older than Patty and 10 years older than me, hence my nickname from him–Baby Sister.

Little sisters sometimes torture their brothers and I am sure there were times when Vic would rather have been anywhere else doing anything else but babysitting us or taking us somewhere or refereeing our occasional skirmishes.

Because he was so much older than me, I have always had a mixture of love and hero worship for Vic. When he left for college when I was 7, I was so very sad but looked forward to his phone calls home where I had saved up my best joke of the week to tell him. They were along the lines of, “Where were the first donuts fried? In Greece.” You get the material. He was always willing to listen to and, more importantly, laugh at my lines.

I also wanted to share examples of the wonderful advice I got from Vic over the years. And I do that today via a letter that I wrote to him after his episode of sudden death and his first cancer: “… you believed in me and encouraged me while tempering my sometimes overly high sense of self. Remember when you taught me the importance of not saying 'I know' all the time? I do, and being able to say I don’t know … has served me well. You helped me practice cursive writing at our kitchen table earning me As in penmanship. (Wow, do they even do that anymore?) You read The Emperors New Clothes, The Ugly Duckling and Aesop’s Fables to me until you were probably ready to scream. But all those stories taught me lessons that I still use today."

Until I married the fabulous Ed, you were my first source of knowledge and advice in almost all my important life decisions (college selection, college finances, first job, first car). You’ve been an important part in post-Ed decisions too (job changes and retirement).

Many memories came unbidden over the last month as we visited with Vic and helped him transition. I thought I would share two.

When we were kids, our dad got a bumper pool table from a guy he knew that owned a bar. Dad brought it home and put it in the laundry room. It came with a coin slot that bar customers would insert a dime into to play. That was promptly removed. We played bumper pool many an afternoon in the basement where it was cool during the summer. Free pool at our house. We were the envy of the neighborhood. That fall, Vic went to college. Little did we know, but he kept that coin slot and reinstalled it before he left. Envy turned to longing as we looked at the pool table when we didn’t have a dime and Mom’s coin purse and Dad’s pockets yielded dust or other coins that weren’t the important dimes. When we had a dime, we would do everything we could to keep the game going without the balls going into the slot. So much fun, although it might not have seemed it at the time.

In our neighborhood, Vic was the oldest boy. In fact, he and Stevie Langerak were the only boys. A pair of sisters lived next door, at our house and across the street. Stevie had his sister, Kathy, my neighborhood best friend. Vic was also the only driver. He was pretty good-natured about taking the girls on adventures, like fireworks night at Denver Bears stadium about 11 blocks from our home. What I remember most about those nights was not necessarily the fireworks but the game he created that we would play on the way home. He would have us memorize the last two digits of our ticket stub and then take them all and mix them up. Then he would pick one at random. When he picked mine, I was excited and terrified all at the same time. Because if you won the ticket lottery you needed to get the whole group home by providing the driving directions to Vic. Yikes. Whenever it was my turn, I was always so confident. But every once in a while, he would make up a reason why he had to turn the opposite way of what I suggested. We always made it home safe and sound.

Well, Vic, I hope you are safe and sound on your journey now. I hope you’ve seen every animal you’ve ever had at the Rainbow Bridge, especially Tippy and Wags, experienced the best times of your life again by now and are moving on to whatever is next. There is one thing I need to confess to you though before I close. Remember when I was in high school and you loaned me your copy of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee and warned me that you wanted it back because you loved it and wanted to read it again? Remember how you got it back? Torn and tattered with dog ears on the pages? Remember how angry you were? Well, I never had the guts to tell you, but I didn’t even finish it …

Godspeed my brother, you mean the world to me, then, now and always.

I loved that story about the ticket lottery—I had never heard it before. 💗

Then we moved on to the in-service slide show. Here's what I said about that:

Next up, that not-20-minute slide show. I’ll admit that it was challenging to find pictures of Vic because he was always behind the camera, but I think I managed to find a few gems. Special shout out to Vic’s cousin Sean who put this beautiful video together for us as well as the one that was playing when you walked in. I hope you enjoy this trip through time.

Note: This video is just shy of nine minutes long. The music for this slide show—also picked by Vic—is What a Wonderful World by Louis Armstrong, Over the Rainbow by Israel Kamakawiwo'ole and Annie's Song by John Denver. Again, for those of you who can't see embedded videos, you can find this video here: In-Service Slide Show

Next came my eulogy.

I first met Vic in 1984. I had applied for a job at IBM, and he called me in for an interview. He gave me some prospective dates, and I was unavailable for all of them. I explained that my grandpa had just passed away and I was leaving for the funeral the next day. Without missing a beat, Vic said, “Oh, playing hard to get, huh?”

If you knew Vic, this story does not come as a surprise. Even someone who only knew him when he was unconscious—the doctor who saved his life when his heart stopped in an Apple store more than a decade ago—described him as a joker. On our first anniversary after that “death”—only a few weeks after he got out of the hospital—he gave me a card with a frog on it that said, “I’ll love you 'til I croak.” I burst into tears. And again, without missing a beat, he said, “Too soon?”

Vic was also the man behind the curtain of our annual holiday letter, The Scallion. I would slave over the first draft, choosing every word carefully, balancing the need to be informational with the need not to bore people to death, and then I would give it to Vic. He would change a word here, a turn of phrase there, very minor modifications. We’d do a few rounds of that, and then we’d send it out. As the reviews started coming in, people would inevitably quote their favorite line. And nine times out of ten, I would say, “Yeah, Vic wrote that.”

I did love his sense of humor, though, especially in the face of all the health challenges he had. His speech therapist called me a few days ago. She just wanted me to know that he was one of her favorite patients, Why? Because no matter what was happening to him, no matter how hard his life was at the time, he was always joking around with her. I’ve heard a lot of similar stories about Vic over the past couple of weeks. They were of great comfort.

Another kind of story I heard a lot was what I call “Vic the superhero” stories. They always started with, “I’ll never forget the time … ,” and then I’d hear some account of Vic bailing someone out of a jam, helping someone out at the last minute, pitching in somewhere that he was needed. Dogs were often involved. Vic always showed up.

Now Vic always thought I was the favorite everywhere we went. And here’s how he would describe it: Whenever we walk into a room together, everyone says, “PATTY!!! Oh, hi Vic.” I mean, he wasn’t necessarily wrong, but I knew he was loved every bit as much as I was, and that point was driven home again and again in the past few weeks. I promised him that I would give him a service he would approve of, but he would really hate this part because he was exceedingly uncomfortable with compliments. But if this is going to be a celebration of life, I want to celebrate his life by telling you what other people thought of him. So here are some of those things.

• “He was such a caring, important person in my life.”
• “I’ll always be inspired by him.”
• “I will always cherish the moments spent with him.”
• “I feel privileged to have known him.”
• “He was my idol, the brother I never had.”
• And, more than once, “He was like a father to me.”

It was truly wonderful to have my certainty that he was universally loved confirmed by so many people.

One last thing. Almost everyone mentioned was how much they would miss seeing his pictures on Facebook. He had 24,644 pictures on his hard drive, so he was never without content. He changed his profile picture and cover photo nearly every day. He had pictures of most family members from birth, so he never let a birthday go by. He chronicled every family gathering. And while he loved taking pictures on our vacations or trips to the zoo or the botanic gardens, he was just as interested in photographing the praying mantis that landed on my parents’ deck or the one ear of corn we grew one year. In his later years, when he couldn’t get out to take new pictures, he set up his camera in our bedroom window, which gave him a front row seat to every kind of sunset imaginable, hot air balloons rising in front of the mountains, the entire city of Longmont, and the moon pictures he was famous for. He often posted “themed” albums. The desert. Birds. Holidays. Beloved shelter dog Wags. But the theme people brought up most often was his “… and a lady” series: pictures of a rainforest, the Grand Canyon, a waterfall, a Hawaiian beach, even just a big rock—all with me in front of them. I was in more than 2,700 of his pictures.

I couldn’t have been happier to have been his “… and a lady” for the last 36 years.

The last time I timed this it clocked in at seven and a half minutes. Not bad, although Vic would have preferred less than five. I did my best. So without further ado, I turn it over to my sister, Laura, to bring us home.

Laura went to the podium with props! Here's what she had to say:

Many of us know Vic loved baseball, so in honor of that, let’s just say I’m batting clean-up, with a few housekeeping details and a couple of final thoughts. Patty said I have 45 minutes, so let me pull out my notes [pulls out giant notebook] because I don’t want to forget anything. [Margeaux tries to get Laura’s attention.] What? 4 to 5 minutes? Well … that’s very different. All right—I’m just going to try and whip through these, and while it might sound like the side effects after a drug commercial, I’ll enunciate.

On behalf of my sister and Vic’s family, I want to thank you all for coming today. The outpouring of “love” has been amazing to bear witness to. Truly special. But Vic (a man I consider to be more brother than brother-in-law) was a truly special person, and he deserves this, even if HE wouldn’t think so. We all know differently though, don’t we? In fact, if a man is not judged by how much he loved but by how much he’s loved by others, then it’s obvious Vic was a man who was well and truly loved. And we ALL are grateful for you to be here and share in that love. (Uff da—that’s a lot of *Love*.)

There is a lunch reception immediately following the memorial (out the back and to the left), and we ask that you please remain seated until the Howe Mortuary staff dismisses your row. If you are not able to stay for the reception, there will be a small receiving line—Patty, his son Bryan, and his sisters Patty and Alice—up here. Howe will also lead that dismissal as well.

At one point, I said to Patty, “This whole thing could just be about your love for one another.” But she insisted we include all the people in their orbit because, as she was fond of saying, “Who doesn’t love Vic?” So for just a bit, I AM going to make it about them. Our cousin Amy said to Patty yesterday, “You were appropriately named ‘Love’—it embodies your life with each other.” And Bryan’s wife, Liz, said to me last night, “It’s like from the moment they first met, there were stars in their eyes that were only for each other.” And I think we would agree that we all love the Loves. One of Vic’s songs for Patty was Annie’s Song, which you heard during the slide show. Patty didn’t tell me a song she had for Vic, but I imagine it could be the Van Morrison song, Someone Like You, of which one of the lines is, “someone like you makes it all worthwhile.” But I think their together song is Adele’s To Make You Feel My Love. The first verse goes like this:

     When the rain is blowing in your face
     And the whole world is on your case
     I could offer you a warm embrace
     To make you feel my love
     When the evening shadows and the stars appear
     And there is no one there to dry your tears
     I could hold you for a million years
     To make you feel my love.

So while you didn’t have a million years, you made the absolute best of what you had. And we are all better for having been in your sphere.

I imagine that right now, Vic would be looking at his watch, so let me start to close by sharing a little something I think he would have been OK with. I actually heard his voice when I read it. It’s from poet Susan Polis Schutz and is titled Come Into the Mountains:

     Come into the mountains, dear friend
     Leave society and take no one with you
     But your true self
     Get close to nature
     Your everyday games will be insignificant
     Notice the clouds spontaneously forming patterns
     And try to do that with your life

To finally close, Vic spent some time trying to think of what he wanted the last song to be for the funeral he didn’t really want but Patty said he needed to have so we all could gather to celebrate his life. (Thanks for that, Patty.) A few came to mind, as befitting his irreverent outlook on life, such as Closing Time (“You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here”); the Watermelon Crawl—not a song that is appropriate for an occasion such as this, but he heard it at a wedding he photographed and loved it (“If you drink, don’t drive, do the watermelon crawl”); Roll Me Up and Smoke Me When I Die (“When I get my wings and it’s my time to fly, call my friends and tell them there’s a party, come on by”); and Always Look on the Bright Side of Life (“For life is quite absurd, and death’s the final word, you must always face the curtain with a bow. Forget about your sin, give the audience a grin, enjoy it, it’s your last chance anyhow”). But in the end, there was really only one choice, based on his love of John Denver. So sit back and enjoy this last thing Vic chose for us to hear.

And the YouTube link to the above video: Forest Lawn by John Denver

All-in-all, I think it was a service Vic would have enjoyed attending. If you made it this far, I'll leave you with one more video, a smattering of pictures from the service taken by my nephew Xan. (Thank you, Xan!)

Note: In a rare bit of brevity by me, this video is less than two minutes long! And in case you're wondering (although you shouldn't be by now), yes, Vic picked the music. It is Gift of a Thistle from the movie Braveheart. And here's one more link in case you can't see embedded videos: One Last Slide Show