Saturday Morning Political Cartoon will resume next week..
This past week was a wash.. with tears. My nephew, Shaun Michael, was in a car accident last Sunday night. He suffered massive head injuries. He called himself a peace maker.
Please flip with me.
Shaun was born to Maggie and Randy 17 years ago. He has a big sister Cera and big brother Chris. Sunday night he was driving home from choir practice, was nearly home, but took a wrong turn. We don't know why, but he crossed the center line, knocked over a mailbox and garbage can. He must have panicked and over corrected, because next his car went back across the road, through two fences and into a tree. He was thrown from the car, despite wearing a seat belt, and suffered massive head injuries. So massive, the doctors couldn't do anything. (There were no substances in his body affecting his driving judgment.)
Many people came and went during those last hours to say good bye.. Mom (shaun's gramma), and Moe (aunt), made it in from Georgia with a few minutes to spare. Several of his loved ones attended his last breath. I was there with one hand on his left shoulder and one on his arm. Don't believe the movies.. Shaun's last breath was a last emphatic demand for life. The injuries sustained to his brain answered that demand with an absolute no.
Shaun died Monday, November 19th, at 3:35 3:45 pm.
His kidneys and liver went to save the lives of three people, because he had opted to be an organ donor. That gift allows a little bit of sense to be made from this horror.
He was a wonderment, independent, sassy and creative. He was handsome, even with his braces. He read the Harry Potter series, I don't know how many times. Pillows left unattended in his house, would inevitably find their way to Shaun's bed, in that big room that was too small to contain his creativity. One of his creative expressions was in how he dressed and wore his hair, driving the adults in his life crazy sometimes. Like when he decided to grow a foot high blue mohawk.
Shaun was kind and sensitive. Some of the darker aspects of our world concerned him. He wrote on his my-space profile that he was a peace-maker. It's a wrong time for a young man such as Shaun to go out of the world.
The funeral was amazing. The room was packed, every seat taken, people standing in the aisles on both sides and the center aisle had two people side by side. The back was full, the loft and stairs to the loft, and the lobby and reception room. There were people in the hall way, and outside into the parking lot. The count was 400 plus people.
There were kids from Shaun's high school filling better than half the chapel, but were also adults who loved him, and his family.. Many many people were wearing Shaundanas (bandanas in honor of Shaun, who loved wearing them). There was lots of tears, but lots of laughter too, as people got up to tell their stories. When the ministers cut short the story telling, there were still people lined up both sides of the front of the chapel with their slips of paper of things they wanted to say.
Created by a friend of Shaun.
The choir, he was part of at church,sang "You Raise Me Up". Two friends played an instrumental they composed for Shaun on guitars, one broke down crying while playing. Three guys stood in front and pulled up their shirts to show the tatoos, done after Shaun died, that said "Shauny Boy" on their backs, one had his name tatooed on his arm, but the one for the records books was his life long friend baring his butt where "Shauny boy" was tatooed.
Shaun's sister Cera,
in an amazing display of composure, interpreted the whole funeral into sign language for Tim, Shaun's deaf Uncle. Maggie and Randy were flooded with people before and after the ceremony.. Maggie was red eyed , exhausted and gracious. Randy was bent, as though the grief has weighed him down.
Seeing them hurt so bad is almost as painful as losing Shaun. Randy's son, Chris and his wife Andy and their kids were there from Spokane...
Mom (gramma), Moe (aunt), and Robert (cousin) were there with their whole hearts and souls.
I've only seen TJ cry one another time since he became a teenager. He cried yesterday. TJ watched the funeral from the side door to the hall, even though there was a seat for him. Tears are a private thing for TJ . After the service, he was better able to socialize, during the reception On his "my space" webpage, he typed that Shaun is his hero..
Dennis (Shaun's uncle)came over and was wonderful moral support. Steve and Marcella ,long time friends of family came from Seattle. The person who posts here at KOS as "my friend MAX", on Saturday Morning Political Cartoon, came with their significant other.
On the other side of the world, Uncle Michael put up an honorarium, for Shaun, who went to China in 2005 to visit Michael and Margaret. Shaun walked around Shanghai taking pictures, and then wrote a short narrative about each experience depicted picture... for Michael's website Shanghai Expat.
If this seems disjointed, it's because Nothing in time or space seems right.
Cross posted at Choice Changes.com.
Peace to all!