No funerals...how strange? Not.

The first question asked about Herb and Lorrain is "why no funeral services"?  The simple answer is they didn't want one.  Neither one did.  But the more complex question is "why didn't they"?

To answer this requires that you know Herb and Lorrain.

They were happily people and funerals ALWAYS saddened them.  The grief of attending funerals caused them to avoid them.  In the half century I knew them, I don't ever recall them going to one and if they did ever attend one...they never talked to me about it.  And they had plenty of friends who died...being in their 90's they felt as if all their friends had died.  Makes sense that they didn't want to cause sadness for others.

The fact that they didn't want funerals was clear.  Because they said so.  It was difficult to get them to even draft an obit.  Lorrain refused to write one.  Herb wrote one and it reads like a bad police report;  "Herb left to join The Lord on------.  He tried to do the Lord's work while on this earth. He was born in Milwaukee on November 27 1918 and died in -----Idaho.

Factually correct..  Yet woefully incomplete.  You see, Dad never could bring himself to talk about himself to others. He had no ego.  He was humble to a fault.  Makes sense that a selfless man wouldn't want a group to gather to praise him at a funeral.  But he did tell stories to his family.  These stories give us valuable insights into his values.

Lorrain had a different slant on it.  No, she didn't like to talk about herself either.  But, there was a more simple...and honest reason for no funeral; she often said she wasn't going.

If she would get sick she would call for whiskey.  Not to drink.  Not for some type of cure.  The whiskey wasn't medicine to her.  She would take a sip because " I don't want to die with whiskey on my breath". Made sense to her.  She reasoned that if she had whiskey on her breath, then she just couldn't die.  It would be too embarrassing to her family and God wouldn't do that to her or them. She'd known those who died with whiskey on their breath as a girl in Milwaukee.  And how people talked!  Nope.  Not for her.   A sip and she felt as if she just had to recover as if by a psychosomatic remedy.  Too bad we didn't bring her a wee dram when she was hospitalized.   But that is quite another story.