Totally drained

That's how I feel today.

Survived the funeral. There were full military honors and bagpipes. I don't know what it is about old guys in military uniforms, but they make me think of my grandpa and it makes me bawl.

And about the bagpipes ... I actually like bagpipes, but I've come to associate them with funerals so much that whenever I hear them, I start getting a knot in my chest that makes it hard to swallow.

There's something very raw about the sound of bagpipes, the droning and the whining. And that breath of air that it takes to get them started before the notes start to sound right. It seems appropriate for a funeral, because it sounds like the last rasping breath a person might take as they die.

It was the most genuine funeral I have ever attended. And I was very proud to sit with the family.

I was cleaning out my email inbox today after the funeral and found an email from Brian from last May. It made me cry again. But for once I'm glad that I have, like, 12 pages of old emails I haven't trashed. I'll share the most important part of the email, because I think that all of us need to realize this.

"I am thinking about things that I should think of more often. About people I love and mean the world to me. There are some things in this world that I do very well... and some that I do not. A number of people once were here, and now they are not. And I never told them how I felt about them."

Well, for the record, I'm thinking about this today, too. And I wish that we could all attend our own funerals, like Tom Sawyer. I hope Brian knows how much everyone cared about him and could hear what we all said and thought today.