Life of Wry

Another day of soaking in the life and times of Jim Sr.

Jim, Peter, Chad, Teri, Brian and I spent the afternoon with Elisa at her house. Her brother and sister (Richard and Jeannie) have been staying there, and were on hand, as well. (And Jeannie’s son John.)

Now comes the hard part…  dealing with the realities of life after Jim.

There are a lot of decisions to be made and a thousands logistics to deal with (where Elisa will live, what she’ll do with a lifetime of belongings–crammed full into closets and drawers everywhere). She’ll need a lot of help settling into her new life and nobody lives close by.

This day was full of sadness, but also plenty of delight. Between discussions of wills, home care services, assisted living facilities, insurance policies, emergency procedures and so on, was all the rummaging through photos…

Letters…

Old coast guard uniforms….

Love the buttons on these uniforms!!

And…. some WWII paraphernalia.  Now, this requires some ‘splainin’….

Jim’s platoon removed this flag from a captured German command post, and all the platoon members signed their names to their souvenir:

And this gun was taken from a dead German officer… a 1914 German Luger..

We continued a whole bunch of story telling, in and amongst the overwhelm.. and of course ate like exhausted sad people:

A couple other shots…. this is a shot of Marty and Brian through the flowers:

Speaking of flowers, I loved seeing the plant mom sent to Elisa, a gorgeous lily that Elisa really loved:

With a very heart-felt note that was written by some who understands…

And later, after returning to our house, Peter threw the ball around a bit more…

… as the storm clouds gathered.