Odds & ends

• I just realized that the last post I published was #600!!!
• The recent death of my cousins' aunt was, unfortunately, just the beginning of a string of deaths I heard about in the space of a week.
• At a bridal shower I attended a week ago Sunday, I learned of the death of dh's cousin's wife's grandmother (if you've got all that...!) -- and last Monday, dh, BIL, SIL & I, along with several other cousins, attended visitation at a local funeral home. (The grandmother was 90, so her death was not received with quite the same sadness that a younger person's might have been.)
• However -- it just so happened this was the SAME funeral home where dh, my mother & I went to plan Katie's funeral. We drive by there quite often, but this was the first time we had set foot in the place since paying the bill shortly after the funeral. We never went beyond the office near the front door then but, even so, it was a surreal experience to be back there.
• Then, speaking with my mother last week, I learned that my cousin's ex-husband, father of her two daughters, had died of a brain aneurysm. This cousin is a few months older than I am; her ex had just turned 53.
• I remember attending their wedding some 30 years ago, when I was in university. My cousin wore her mother's wedding dress; my aunts sobbed in the pews behind us, commenting on her striking resemblance to her mother.
• My cousin's mother (my uncle's wife) had died in childbirth some 15 years previously, along with one of the twin girls she was carrying, in the early 1960s, when my cousin (the bride) and her older sister were barely school aged. She was being rushed by ambulance from the small rural hospital into the city, but sadly died en route. I have very few memories of her -- the chief one being that she offered me puffed wheat cake when we visited their farm one time -- but the lingering impression (confirmed by the stories I have heard from my mother & others) is that she was a warm and cheerful woman, much loved by everyone. My mother remembers that she was at a church group meeting when my dad called her with the news; he was crying so hard he could barely choke out the words. They piled us into the car & drove all night to join the rest of the extended family, some 600 miles away on roads that were not as well developed as they are today.
• Both the funerals/memorials for my cousins' aunt & my other cousin's ex were held last Friday.
• And then -- if I didn't feel like I'd had enough sad news over the past week, & that the links to my childhood were beginning to disappear far too quickly lately -- I found out Davy Jones of The Monkees had died of a heart attack at the far-too-young age of 66. The Monkees were among my original childhood pop star idols (along with The Beatles and Herman's Hermits)(and I do mean childhood -- I was 5 when their show began and 7 when it went off the air). We didn't get their show on TV where we lived, but of course we heard their songs on the radio & saw the show in reruns at my grandmother's house in the States in the summertime -- and Davy, of course, was my favourite.
• I couldn't even exclaim about it aloud at work -- I didn't want to hear the inevitable question -- "Who's Davy Jones?" -- from the 20-something coworkers who surround my cubicle. :p
• Seriously -- how cute were these guys? (Justin Bieber, eat your heart out, lol.)