Saturday, August 12, 2006

More Sad News..

Sadly, I'm off to yet another memorial service for a friend - this makes the third one this year, and the second that was an accident. (This time, it was a wall falling down) Unfortunately, it landed on one of our good friends, a father of three, devoted American Sign Langauge speaker (he wasn't deaf, he just helped the deaf community) and painter, Steve McTavish. An animated chap and a sweet man, this world will be a bit less fun and bright without him.

I did the flowers for his eldest daughters' wedding, and I've always held what he said to me at the end as one of my favorite compliments. A thin man, who always ran at full-steam until he dropped, he cut a handsome figure in his rented tuxcito as he walked Sharon down the aisle, danced with her and his sweet wife Rosemarie and their other two daughters. By the end of the night, he loosened his bow tie, came over and gave me a huge hug and kiss on the cheek, and pulled back, looking intensely into my eyes. "I do not want to do this again anytime soon....but whenever it happens, we're calling you. Thank you so much for everything, it was really beautiful." Scott and I have shared some really nice times with him and his whole family, so the accident was a real blow to all.

Of course, no one is as stunned and shocked and devastated as his family - he leaves behind a really loving wife, three daughters and a son-in-law, countless cousins, neices, nephews and many, many friends. I'm sure there will be at least three hundred people there today, I'll be leaving early to try and get a seat, but I don't expect one. I suppose our lesson for the day is: Cherish your friends and family, you never know when an accident might happen.

3 comments:

Eris said...

I am so sorry. My regards to the family and the friends.

Maya said...

Thanks - I went with Christie (my girlfriend, you know, I talk about her her sometimes) --- there were 504 people there. The man was well-loved. It was really nice to see, and since its been a few weeks (it happened in New Mexico and I believe they had a service out there, too, but they were from around here so they had ANOTHER service here.) the family was better than I expected.

Unknown said...

Hub-E and I really wanted to go, but we just couldn't. There's been so much hellaciousness going on lately with regard to Gramma, that we weren't able to get out of town down there. With that amount of people, we probably wouldn't have been noticed anyways.