Monday, May 28, 2007

Etiquette schmetiquette!

I spent this afternoon finally writing all the thank you notes for the donations, etc., related to Mom’s funeral. (She died from cancer on February 24 after only having been diagnosed two months and two days earlier.) Dad could hardly take that I was doing the thank you cards, let alone be willing or able to help. It sucked. Whose dumb idea was it anyway that the grieving family should send out thank you cards? It would make a lot more sense to me if etiquette took the logic of: Donations, flowers, etc sent as an expression of sympathy to a funeral should be sent with no expectation of an acknowledgment out of respect for the grieving family.

I asked the funeral director about it back in February when he was giving us the thank you cards to use and the list of who sent flowers. He just looked sufficiently sympathetic and shrugged his shoulders. At least according to him we didn’t have to send out thank you to everyone who sent a card, just folks who made some extra expression of sympathy.

The toughest part was when I got to the bottom of the basket and got to all the get well cards that Mom had organized in it when she first got sick. She turned 63 on January 6 so she also had a few birthday cards mixed in there. I held back the crying until I came across those. But that was too much. It just reminded me of how much she never had a chance to feel better.

I miss her so much.


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