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07/11/2004 Entry: "Fran Skidmore 1959 - 2004" Well, it's over. Fran died this morning at around 5am. So much has happened in just the last 24 hours, that's it's kind of hard to collect everything into one entry. Friday, we knew Fran was really sick, but again, he comes and goes. But he needed to see his hospice nurses so Christine said she'd drive him back a week early. So, come Saturday morning, they all piled into the blue Saturn (the green one has an "engine warning -seek service" light which we have neither time nor money to deal with), and drove to West Virginia. I didn't go because there was barely room for 3 people, much less 4, and we couldn't leave CR alone, and I had an MSD meeting to go to. Christine said she'd drop off Fran, drive back, pick me up from the meeting in Frederick, and we'd all come home. Of, course, that didn't happen. It changed when Christine got to West Virginia, where the Hospice nurses said he had to be put in the hospital immediately. So Christine stuck around to hear the diagnosis, and they said he probably wouldn't last the week. She called me at the MSD meeting (which was more of a one-on-one since I was the only one who showed up besides the owners Kory and Allison), and said she wasn't going to pick me up. Kory and Allison said they'd get me home, it wasn't a big deal, because the Game Parlour is three miles away from my house, and they had business to do there anyway. I tried not to think about it by just doing massive brain dumps on those two poor people. They fed me roast beef and lamb, but my jaw has been hurting so much, I couldn't chew very well (the other side of my mouth from the pain is where all those molars are broken, so I have no "good side" anymore). They were really cool about everything. I felt like "Goth Disaster Boy," and really tried not to be some pathetic psychodrama in their living room. I probably failed. When I got home, I left Christine a message on her cell I got back safely, and then kind of sat in a depressive funk, trying to convince myself I didn't know Fran that well, and his impending death (which was still sort of a "it's months away" in my head) I had already prepared for. I just sort of stared at the ceiling, lost in some sort of depressive haze. Christine called and said that she was coming home no matter what on Sunday, and that Fran was really sick, and how certain flaky people in her family should go to hell. After the call, I took more Tylenol, and went to sleep, remembering echos of my own mother's death, my mother-in-law's (who was a second mother to me) death in 1998, my grandmother in 2000, and my sister-in-law a little over a year ago, my other grandmother just a month ago. Then a lot of other deaths over the years, like Jo-ann, Nanny, Bobbie, and then the list got too big (I think over 10 people close to me have died in 15 years). I don't even want to think about it anymore. I am tired of funerals. I don't ever want to have one. I don't want any of my friends to have to boo-hoo over my sorry ass. I want a huge party with a massive Chinese food buffet. So this morning, I got up, and decided to try and assimilate evrything before I went mad. Then Christine called to say Fran had died, but she didn't tell me earlier because she wanted me to sleep. So I dropped all the stuff I was doing, and started this entry. Fran didn't want a funeral or anything, but the complication of money came up. Now, we don't have any, his suriving other two sisters certainly don't have any, and his kids didn't have any, either. But luckily, that got sorted out when his biological father said, "Send all the bills to me." Fran's ashes go to his daughter Hope (a girl I always had a soft spot for ever since I knew her when she was 4, then 8, who is now I think 17), but we're not sure if there's going to be a service or anything. Debbie has said that there will be no service if his kids don't come up, so that's what we're wating for. Christine's coming home tonight, then we're going to the dentist to find out why my jaw hurts so much on Monday, then probably on Tuesday we're all going to pile into the small blue Staurn and go to West Virginia and God knows what else. The plans change by the hours.