A week at the cottage and a funeral

My family is a rather low-key bunch of vacationers.  Every year we rent a set of cottages on a lake in Fremont, MI.   The week is set aside for hard-core loafing: nothing is scheduled, no serious outings are planned.  It's a week to kick back, read, play a few games, swim in the lake, and walk the same fairly dull walk about 10 times.  Many snacks are brought and eaten, and cooking on the grill is frequent.  This week pretty much fit that same pattern.  We had gorgeous weather; it was sunny every day and rained only twice and at night.  The lake was very warm from all of the hot weather we've had lately and made for nice swimming.  Max actually went in three times, which was about three times more than I expected, given his aversion to water.  On one of the hotter days he was in there for a half an hour or more, exploring the shallow water with his floatie. 

The highlight of the week for him, though, was playing in the sandbox with A2.  It seemed like every time I turned around he and A2 were packing buckets full of sand and dumping them out.  She was like my little babysitter all week long.  They just entertained each other.  It was wonderful.  

We made a little progress on the toilet training too.  Most of the week we had accidents of the grosser kind and no one could offer a good incentive to him to try harder, though V. tried very hard.  Then on Thursday, A1's friend, J. came up and was there when I was talking to Max about trying harder.  Up until now I've been saying if he wanted to go to preschool, he'd have to be able to go poopie on the potty, but he'd just say he'd rather not go to preschool.  This time I said, "When you're at preschool, if you have an accident, your teacher will have to call me and I'll have to come and change you.  All the other kids will know you're not trained."  J.'s 9-year-old eyes widened, "Dude, that's just not cool!"  Max argued back, laughing, wanting J.'s attention, "Yeah, that cool."  

J. said, more emphatically, "No, no.  Dude, it's your mom - at school.  That's not cool."  

After that Max had two successful, self-initiated visits to the potty on that same day.  Who says peer pressure is bad?

We had one other memorable funny moment.  Max and I were at the library in the bookstore, and Max was asking what was for lunchies.  "I don't know yet," I said.  "How bout we go sushi westwan, Mommy?" Max asked.  A woman behind me made sort of a loud "Ug" noise.  "Me like sushi, Mommy!" Max said.  "I do too, but I don't think they have a sushi restaurant here," I said.  And the lady said, rather loudly, "No we do not!"  

I thought this was rude, but kind of funny.  Other than the chain restaurants, the pickings are kind of slim in Fremont - mostly American and not remarkable, although we've yet to try Guiseppe's which V. and my parents have recommended.  Frankly, a sushi restaurant would be a welcome addition in my humble opinion.  I find Fremont's small town environment to be very nostalgic and think I could adapt to the more rural lifestyle fairly well - except I would really miss the lack of restaurant variety.  Our favorite restaurants tend to be small foreign ones with immigrant owners.

Other than that, everything was peaceful and nice.  I missed Rosie a lot, but that's the way it goes.  The call about Aunt Sharon cast a pall over the later part of the week, however.  The first news was that she had stopped breathing but had been intubated.  Mom and Dad went back home to see her then.  The doctor had decided to take the tube out, and she did breathe on her own, but it didn't look good.  Then the next morning we got the call that she had died.  I felt very sad about her death.  We weren't close, but Max and I had visited her many times, and it was just sad to think I'd never see her again.  

Mom had to do long-distance funeral planning and relative alerting, and I offered to put together a page about her life if she'd give me some details.  So Mom wrote down a bunch of her memories, I typed and edited it, but that's all I could do at the cottage.  Friday when I came home, I went through all of my photos and came up with two usable ones.  Then I made up a page on Publisher because I found it so hard to put photos into Word when I did our profile and thought the other format would be better.  It was, but then this morning when I went to print it out, my printer only printed part of each paragraph, so I really had to move to get it done.  I burned a disk, then sent J. out to Office Max to have copies made.  I was so worried we'd be late, but we made it there on time, and the page looked very nice.  I made a copy to post online here.  The funeral was nice.   Almost no one wore black and dress was a bit more casual than I expected.  I stuck out like a sore thumb in my charcoal blazer and black skirt, donned at the last moment because I was sure that my black culotte dress was not formal enough.  We sang a number of old Protestant hymns which I enjoyed.  I sat next to my sister, and she harmonized and it felt a little like when we were girls in church together.  The pastors' comments were appropriate and kind.  One of them talked about a book called 90 Minutes in Heaven which is apparently about one man's near-death experience in which he saw heaven and was overwhelmed by the happy joyful music he heard there.  Having recently re-read Connie Willis's Passage, I couldn't help but think, "I bet that music was the manifestation of the slow physiological process of brain death.  The synapses are firing randomly and you get a concerto."  I said this to J. and he called me an agnostic.  I can't help my little heresies.  I have no certainty about what happens after death.  I think Christianity is pretty vague out it, for good reason.  Scripturally, there's not that much to go on, and what's there is more like allegory than blueprint.  And there's no timeline.  Do you die and go straight to be with God?  In Heaven?  Or do you go to Purgatory?  Or wait in a state of limbo until the Second Coming and the creation of a New Heaven and a New Earth?  At which point - will there be a "Heaven" as we think of it as a repository for the souls of good people?  Or will they be returned to an earthly state minus the mortality...or not.  Too many questions.  I don't know any of the answers and feel okay with not knowing, actually. 

I think that wherever my Aunt Sharon is, she's at more peace than she was in before.  I'm grateful for that.