Dusting Off the Dead

Tweet

I posed this discussion on another forum and thought I would pose the same to my friends here in mylot. I was laying in bed last night thinking about this blog thing and wondering how to get started with it. I realize that blogs are a type of online journals where people make public their thoughts and opinions on certain subjects of interest to them. As so often happens to me when I am trying to wind down for the night and go to sleep my mind was racing from one thing to the other and this lead me to the fact that my living room is in dire need of dusting. This thought lead me to thinking about my brother who resides in a brass box decorated with a lovely etched beach scene, sitting on the lower self of an end table in my living room. My brother died a very lonely death in a prison system in Florida, he was 35. At the time of his death none of the family knew his were abouts. It was not until my sister who lives in Florida got the call from the prison Chaplin, had we any clue that he had been in trouble yet again. My sister had him cremated and eventually I brought him home to Tennessee with the intent of having him buried next to our mother. Well you know what they say about good intentions. Through out the years he has been in my home in his brass container, he has been a conversation piece. When my youngest son was younger he would often try and impress his friends with the fact that we had a dead person proudly displayed in our home. There were in fact a few of his young buddies that were scared and a bit taken aback by this fact. We share him with other family members and friends at holidays or just together when we remember him or make jokes about him (and trust me with my brother there is plenty to laugh at). I even at times find myself talking to him. So my thoughts are at this point how many people actually keep family members who have passed on and been cremated with them in their homes. Is this normal? I know you see it in the movies all of the time, you know aunt Martha getting knocked off the mantel in some rambunctious juvenile tryst. But how many folks actually do this? I think knowing my brother the way I do, he would have it no other way, and where ever he is he laughs along with us, and enjoys the company we keep.