A Day to Keep Track Of

Some days are just hard to follow.

Kim and I drove up to northern Wisconsin on Friday, up to Kim’s old stomping grounds in Rusk County. It’s not a bad drive, if a bit of a hike from Our Little Town – it’s a straight shot up the interstate until you get almost to Eau Claire and then you take the smaller roads until you get to Ladysmith and the hotel is right there on the left right by a whole lot of things that weren’t there the last time Kim was there but that was a number of years and one rather destructive tornado ago so you have to expect that things will change.

We met up with her parents and Rory and Amy at the hotel and had a nice dinner at the old pizza place that they used to frequent back when they lived up this way. You can’t really go wrong with pizza.

Saturday was the memorial service for Kim’s cousin Matt, who died in a car accident almost a year ago now. It’s been a time since then and a lot of things had to get resolved before they could set up the service but things have calmed down a lot in the last year. His wife is being taken care of properly now, and the kids are living with Matt’s sister Darcy and they seemed happy when we went there later in the day.

It took us a while to find the church where the service was held, which was pretty impressive given that Cornell is a fairly small place. But eventually everyone gathered and the service was lovely in the sort of emotionally draining way that anything done for someone who died fairly young tends to be. Some of the people who knew him best got up and spoke, and they made it through pretty well all things considered. It’s not an easy thing to do.

Afterward there was a lunch served in the church basement because that’s how these things work and you can never go wrong with a church basement lunch. From there family members were invited back to Darcy’s, though not right away as things had to get taken care of first.

Kim and I took the time to drive out to see one of the places where she’d lived and then drove back to Ladysmith so I could find some wifi signals because there was another event going on that day.

One of several, in fact, though these two were the only ones we tried to attend.

My friend Nadja was getting married Saturday, and while the actual ceremony was planned to be fairly small she did offer to livestream it for people who lived at a distance and as luck would have it the ceremony started sufficiently after the service and lunch ended that it very nearly worked.

I pulled it up on my phone as we got back into Ladysmith and watched as the preparations got made. There was a lot of the sort of thing that you get with large Zoom meetings with people who aren’t used to Zoom meetings – requests to mute microphones and so on – and then the ceremony started and it was really quite a beautiful thing. You could see the lake in the background, and Nadja’s niece read a couple of poems, and all was going well until the Zoom meeting cut out because technology is what doesn’t quite work. When it works all the time it’s an appliance. So I’m assuming that they did in fact get married in the end, and I wish them all joy and happiness. It was a very nice way to offset the somber beginning of the day, because you have to love the joy of a wedding and the ridiculousness of technology. Life is messy and lovely and that’s just fine. I was glad to have been able to see even a part of it.

And then we went to Darcy’s and hung out with a whole lot of people who are related to me who I don’t often get to see, and we had a good time there too because in the end there is nothing to do with a life but celebrate it, even as you mourn its passing.

It was a kind of a whiplash day that way, but a good one.