Vicarious Rocky

Got my first rejection. I am not a finalist in the RWA competition. I am submitting the same work to two other contests this year and also starting on a new manuscript. I won't lie and say it's not mildly disheartening, but I'm not dissuaded. I mean, have you ever been to a Library book sale and seen the sad awful tripe they can't give away? I can BE that tripe. I just know it. ;-)

Now I like my favorite pizza place even more after they took in 22 preschoolers and showed them the ins and outs of a pizza shop! The kids loved it, of course. I can imagine how a pizza place would not have time or patience to do something like that. I can imagine how a corporation with a team of lawyers would not allow such a field trip. So I am thrilled to see it happen.

Thanks Papa Johns! Now I love your pizza AND your company!

This picture is Pat at Two Amigos celebrating her 40th birthday with us. We forced her to get the giant margarita at lunch and then peer pressured her into finishing it. She stayed late to sober up and came back to our house for cake and presents. I can't remember what we got her, but it was never as good as what Pat would buy all of us.

Pat was really good at buying presents because she was really good at understanding what people liked and then twisting that into a unique gift idea. As in, I love to drink Vodka, I am in Marketing, so she got me a picture coffee table book about the marketing history of Absolute Vodka. I mean, who comes up with something like that? Pat, that's who.

OK, now for the selfish part:

I am 36 and this is the first experience with death of someone I love. Well, except Willy the Dog. But human wise, Pat is the first. Nor can I remember many funerals. There was Aunt Katherine, Glady, and my Great Grandmother. I never knew my paternal grandparents. My Mom's folks are still alive. All my extended family are living. Crazy eh? What a sheltered life I live!

What I learned through Pat's death is that the services are so essential in letting go and moving through the shock and permanence of death. Before I went to the weekend events, I reminded myself that she was dead several times a day to reintroduce the shock. As in, "Pat. Wow. Still dead. Still not going to the film festival with me next weekend." It's like I couldn't or wouldn't say goodbye. I wanted to honor the importance and reality of her being truly missing and that seemed to be all I could come up with.

But the services and all the dedicated time to her -- the travel, the conversations, stories, small talk with friends and family, food -- really did bring closure. I guess that sounds obvious in retrospect, but I always believed the services were mostly to just help the family. I believed I was going to the services for them. And I suppose I did, but now I see how my participation was also for me.

Now it dawns on me that this process we have invented as humans is genius. Earl says he wants to be put under a tree near the end with some cookies and water, but no way. The weekend journey through honoring the dead is good stuff.

Awful Mom



Dead Ants



Dad and Video Games

My friend Pat Smith died yesterday on her birthday. She was 43. It was the classically horrifying story about not feeling well, going to the doctor, being checked into the hospital and then dying suddenly. She was being treated for blood clots and was doing well. In fact, I was told she was up and talking to her visiting family before she instantly died around 10am.

Pat would have re-written that paragraph. In our work world, it’s called a “lead,” and I am terrible at writing them. When I first met Pat, I was not a particularly good writer, but she was amazingly patient with my work. Everything that came back across my desk as a trade magazine editor was edited by my boss Pat, and it was always bloody in corrective ink. Pat was good at her job and she made me good at mine. I credit her with making me a decent writer.

Pat loved her work which was completely odd. Not the love, the work. Even though she was a girly girl in so many ways, like being a huge 19th century female literature fan, she was also a top, respected expert in the machine tool industry. She worked in the machine tool trade for over 20 years. It took her all over the world -- to Korea, Sweden, France and England to name a few.

When we were together, we always had our best times in Chicago. We once stayed out until 5am and couldn’t take a chance going to sleep before our tradeshow work restarted with a 7am client breakfast. And so, we tried our best to stay awake in our fancy Four Seasons hotel lobby, giggling and poking each other for 2 hours, as the staff vacuumed around us.

Pat led a diverse and rich life. She loved so many things so fully. She was a wonderful cook, loved art, fine food, cinema, books, chocolate, and shopping. More importantly she deeply loved her family. She was the only daughter in a family with 4 brothers and they all adored her. She lived with and took care of her aging parents and spent lots of time with her beloved niece Amber.

I last saw her right before Thanksgiving, and we met at the Art Museum before dining and shopping in Little Italy. Over lunch we talked at length about her Father who had struggled back from the brink of death over the summer. Pat encouraged me to get my affairs in order, and we spoke about our own deaths. She was confident, having such spry older family, that she would live to an old age. But she worried about who would care for her. And she said, after seeing her father’s struggle, she wanted to die quickly without any complications.

We were going to get together on the 20th and go to the Cleveland Film Festival. Many people will miss Pat.