This past Saturday we fulfilled the last of Mom's wishes for when she passed.

The first was that she wanted her last rites. Despite not having been a practicing Catholic in... ever, she was still adamant about getting them. The hospital failed miserably at tracking down a priest despite being St. Mary's in the first place. How they managed to fail so fantastically, I'll never know. It took my aunt nearly donning a pith helmet and rifle and going forth to hunt one down (she would too, she is a bad ass who will either force friendship down your throat or destroy you) before the long time head nurse for my Mom's whole case called in a personal favor and got a guy.

So that was taken care of.

Then of course we made sure she was cremated. Thankfully her life insurance was just enough to cover that. Barely. So the last bit was making sure she was thrown a party. Not a wake. Not a funeral. Not a spilling of ashes. Not a memorial. A party. Because that's just how she rolled. That and she was never too fond of dad's alternative plan of having her stuffed and kept in the kitchen with a cigarette in hand, a pepsi in arm's reach and a half finished cross word puzzle in front of here.

Thankfully, when you have aunts and uncles who are detail and planning obsessed, you end up not having to do all that much in this kind of scenario except tell people to show up. So for the first time in probably 25 years our home opened its doors to 30-some people bustling about with food, drink, and stories about my mom. Friends, family, friends that were technically more family than family itself all chatting and striking up new friendships here and there.

Some of them came in with pictures of Mom that they had had from forty or fifty years ago. Others summoned up stories about the time she got stuck in a freak snow drift but managed to keep her glass of wine perfectly filled and snow-free. Or tales of her and my aunt in their younger days, stealing christmas trees to make a quick buck reselling. Only to learn that the trees were full of bees all too ready to rise from slumber in her nice warm house.

Even a friend of hers who I swear has a body mass composed of 75% beard came bearing fire works to light in her honor. And though he wasn't cleaver enough to wait for anything even close to sunset, it was still a lovely gesture.

Things even came together in making sure her ashes were ready for pickup just a couple of hours before people started showing up. In the end, everything probably went better than I hoped. They definitely went better than Dad had feared.

Now it's just a matter of getting into a new pattern of things. Back to work and commissions and comic making for me, and Dad exploring a life in which he's not a caretaker, but at the same time he's a little bit more alone in the world.