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The flight to Ohio was pretty special. My brother, cousin, and Bear had never flown before. The irony of the whole thing was Pops had loved to travel. He was always trying to convince Bear to fly around the country with him. Her response to him was always that “Bears don’t fly.” I kept joking with her that the turbulence was just raccoons we were running over on the road. She just nodded her head until a few minutes she remembered that we were up in the air. She quickly calmed down and enjoyed seeing the clouds and endless fields below us. She kept grabbing my arm to point something out to me outside the window. When she landed she had a huge grin on her face, wiped her hands together as if wiping something off them and said, “That was a piece of cake!” She was waiting for Pops to send her a personalized bolt of lightning her way. I told her if that was easy then she could go to Colorado with me. She liked that idea.

The rest of the day was a flurry of finalizing funeral details and visiting with family that had arrived in town, if you could call it a town. The place is smaller than Mayberry. Life there had reached its peak in the 50s, and it had been deteriorating ever since.  Visiting the cemetery that had the joint headstone already engraved with both of my grandparents’ information was surreal. It brought a smile to my face to see that Helen Jane was followed by her “real” name- Bear.

Meeting at the funeral home was difficult. My grandfather was already laid out, my dad was in surgery, and we were exhausted from travel and grief and trying to make sure the following day would go smoothly. The funeral home was located amongst the rest of the handful of houses in town. The family had run the funeral home for generations, and they lived upstairs. The director went step by step through the next day’s schedule emphasizing that he wanted to make sure everything was done exactly to our liking; however, when we would make a suggestion the response would be drawn out, “Well, I don’t know how it’s done in Florida, but we don’t do that here.”  The people there were nice, but dated.

The evening was spent reuniting with old cousins and meeting new and me fighting a head cold. Dad had come out through surgery well. Thankfully, it was none of the horrid options the doctors had warned us about. It was a strange case of his intestines wrapping around his appendix. It didn’t sound comfortable, but we were all relieved to know it wasn’t cancer.

My grandfather’s funeral passed quickly. Local veterans presented my grandmother with a flag honoring my grandfather’s naval service. The small-town veterans couldn’t remember how to fold the flag and dropped it repeatedly. The war heroes in my family were appalled. I laughed inwardly knowing my grandfather would’ve been cussing them out. It made for a special teaching moment after the funeral- the older men teaching the younger men how to properly fold the flag. That ended up being quite a special moment.

Looking back, it’s amazing how much activity we packed into such a short trip. We numbly walked through it all with plastic smiles adhered to our faces. We visited relatives in the boonies of Ohio I’d always heard about but never met, we did a scavenger hunt for a long-lost family cemetery my grandfather helped locate and remodel. It was beautiful. Strange description for a cemetery, I know, but with the fall leaves, family heritage, and my grandfather’s work, it was truly beautiful.

We returned home carrying our flag, because it wouldn’t fit in anyone’s luggage. It loudly announced to everyone that we had lost a loved one. Trudging through the airport we received many condolences and words of gratitude. After getting home and visiting my dad, it was back to the farm I went.