Laura's Funeral

Roger tells Paula some funny Laura stories

After the move and sitting around at Peter's stuffing myself with stories and pizza I made my way to the Bloor West village to the funeral home where Laura's friends and family were gathering. Funeral's are inherently depressing, especially if you knew the person with the unfortunate luck to meet death.

It was a small but intimate send off. A room with pictures of Laura through various parts of her life all collected into a rather large frame on one side of the room. On the other side a video frame, I'm told this is a new thing, with a multimedia (possibly power point) presentation of digital stills. Even with the depressing subject matter I couldn't help but cringe at the use of technology plus the presentation was pretty crappy. It's kind of ironic as that's how I first met Laura.

We all met working at a place while creating a multimedia CD-rom on the official NHL hockey rules. It was our job to make slick, easy to navigate products. This video frame was no where near the calibre of our work. Just because a person has the tools doesn't mean the final product will shine. It was harsh judgment considering the circumstances and the time they probably had to create it.

I suppose one of the nice things about the funeral was that I got to see people in one place, all at the same time. People that I haven't seen in a while. The most common comment was "It's good to see you despite the unfortunate circumstances.". Right now, as a reader, I want you to get up and call someone you haven't heard from in a long time or someone you feel is close to. Your mother, your father, your girl friend, boyfriend, aunt, uncle, tax guy, whom ever. You shouldn't have to hear that line if you go to a funeral. What does that say about us as a society?


A bunch of us at the Dark Horse pub.

Most of us ended up going to a local pub to eat, drink, catch up and share Laura stories. Memories flooded in of when we working on the hockey project. I remember her thinking Blinn the name of our hamster at work was named after the captain not the James Blinn of computer graphics and math fame (I was pretty nerdy), flapping her arms at Darryl while standing on a desk to get him to concentrate on work and not play video games, providing the voice for some of the hockey rule quicktimes, making a creepy guinea-pig voice when talking to guinea-pigs, wearing big hats, her dry sense of humour, watching Oprah, playing the guitar and driving our effeminate boss crazy.


Making our way into the subway

People die all around us everyday but it's the people we know that tend to affect us more. I suppose Laura passing away has really put an emphasis, to me at least, on how short our lives really are. We should be so lucky to be able to surround ourselves with people we really like and be liked enough to have them attend our funeral.


Take that you green blooded, pointy eared...


Traveling the Better Way is way too much fun