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The undelivered eulogy

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On June 18, after many years of struggle with drug addiction, my youngest brother Chris was found dead of an overdose.  At the funeral service, a close friend to Chris and one of our brothers spoke.  For my own healing process, I elected to write a eulogy of my own.

Let me repeat here what I have personally told my brother and Chris’s friend: nothing about this blog post should be considered an attempt to “set the record straight,” or to somehow clarify or articulate more effectively anything either of them said at the funeral service.  One or both of them covered what follows here; they truly did an exceptional job honoring his memory.  I wrote this to help my own mourning process, simple as that. 

I should also say that they have earned my respect.  It’s taken me literally months to write what they turned around in just a few days.

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A sincere request: please help me answer this question

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So I’m filling out adoption paperwork for our latest attempt at a home study.  Those of you who have gone through this experience know something of how probing these forms can be.  This is one of the questions it asks:

How would others describe you?

I have an idea of what people might say about me.  But different people have seen different sides of me: those who know me in a professional setting are likely to say something rather different than my friends who have only seen me at church.

Because I prefer not to speculate if I can help it, and because I am sincerely desirous to know, I ask you who know me to please answer this question.

Really, I’m serious.  This isn’t a bait-and-switch, or an attempt to determine who my “real friends” are.  If you know me, how would you describe me?  Feel free to go into as little or as much detail as you want.  Don’t worry about hurting my feelings – if you think I’m insufferable, by all means, let me have it.  All I ask is your complete honesty.  And if you prefer to remain anonymous, feel free to leave a comment or send me an email via the contact form.

Unstoppable force versus immovable object: dealing with crying toddlers in public

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Well, this caused quite a little shoving match on the intertubes last week.  Up to a certain point, it was fairly pedestrian: parents take toddler to restaurant, toddler gets wrapped around the axle about something and starts crying.  And then, the wrench in the gears: the restaurant owner comes out and, well…

Naturally, there are a couple of different perspectives of precisely what happened; mom’s version of events is here.  Look, we’ve all had to deal with somebody else’s cranky kid at one time or another.  I find it especially delightful on airplanes, but that’s just a personal preference.  I’ve also found Reasons My Son Is Crying quite amusing, which virtually guarantees that we will end up with a child who considers going thermonuclear a genre of performance art.  But what if that’s the only way we can really learn to cope with toddler meltdowns?  This account suggests that “there is only one guaranteed cure for getting annoyed by it: having a kid.”

For non parents, a crying child on a plane will provoke feelings of rage. For people with a recent memory of parenting, that same crying child will provoke feelings of sympathy for the parent—and perhaps a little relief that it isn’t their problem this time.

It’s like a vaccination; once you’ve had kids, you’ve heard so much relentless crying, your brain has developed an immunity. That’s probably why the allegedly inattentive diner parents didn’t even hear what so vexed the diner owner.

While I’ve worked around enough toddlers that their crying doesn’t quite set me on edge as much as it once did, I’ve heard this from a few parents: that once you have your own, hearing a child cry just doesn’t provoke as it once did.  It almost sounds like Harry Potter after he had destroyed the fragment of the Dark Lord’s soul that had attached itself to his own; once it was gone, he could no longer speak Parseltongue.*

In any event, once we have a child of our own, I do hope to be considerate and remove the child if he/she starts getting fussy.  But as in the case of this story, there are circumstances when taking the child elsewhere just isn’t an option.  So let’s hear from you parents.  What do you do in such a situation?

*Yes, I just compared having a child to battling Voldemort. #sorrynotsorry

MBA: check.

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Ryan graduated from the University of Texas
Hook ’em Horns.

A long, complicated story preceded this picture. I hope to start telling it soon.  For now, it’s enough to say that a goal more than three years in the making has been accomplished.  (In the meantime, read this.)