Am sitting in the lobby of the Holiday Inn with a cup of decaf and doing a blog before the family meets for breakfast at 9:30 a.m. central time for a big Oklahoma breakfast.
Mike's funeral was yesterday. I sat in the front section with the rest of the family members. His wife Donna was extremely gracious to me, having extended an invitation to the funeral. I flew down with Dan and his fiancee Nicole. From Oklahoma City, where Mike worked as a city planner, we drove 90 miles up to Ardmore, where his in-laws have a ranch. The funeral was held at the funeral home that his wife's family has used. They are three generations of cattle ranchers.
Mike himself was brought up on a farm in Crockett, East Texas, so he was not unfamiliar with living off the land. When we were married and lived in Married Student Housing at the University of TX at Austin, he had a vegetable garden out back and used to take little Sarah out there with him. Fig trees grew there and I would pick the succulent pink-centered figs and bake them in cakes. Since I nursed Sarah until till she was 2 years old (that girl would not quit!) I could eat with impunity and would make a different dessert every night for me and Mike.
I learned so much during my married years. My Joy of Cooking book is marked up with all my favorite recipes with little notations such as "OK to add vanilla" or some such.
Highlights of the funeral included:
Two of Mike's colleagues from the Planning Commission, where he worked, giving amazing tributes to the man and his work. They commented on his "genius" to get the job done, his involvement in every single project there w/o which it could not be completed, his loving attention to detail and data-gathering, his dry sense of humor, and his unwavering support as a friend.
This was the man I married. I think of my marriage as a starting point for him. We were both young and needed lots of growing up, and his second wife provided the love and stability for him to complete himself as an ever-evolving man. Naturally I shared these feelings with Donna during our many hours together. I'm so glad I got to know this remarkable woman and her two sisters Janet and Nancy.... the Thomasons, as the signpost says at the ranch. Their parents, in their early 80s, had passed away the last two years.
Tributes to Mike were also presented by Mike's two brothers - David Ball Deming and Joseph Chevalier Deming. His mother Margie, age 89, sat in the front row staring straight ahead while each of her boys got up and spoke. Then Sarah and Dan went to the podium and spoke about their dad.
Two preachers conducted the service. This is an intensely religious family, the Demings, all of whom believe in Jesus Christ Our Lord and Saviour. I'd hoped to raise my kids as Jews but they couldn't abide religious education so I woefully pulled them out of their religious studies and let them choose whether to believe or not believe - in anything.
The service ended with an incredible slide show of photographs w/moving music in the background. Dan had come over my house, gone in the basement and retrieved a gray metal filebox I had totally forgotten about, which held scores of family photographs. Now, here they were enlarged and splashed on a wide screen.
One memorable photo showed Mike kneeling in Sarah's white crib along with baby Sarah who was standing up hold the crib bars. It got a laugh.
At the end, the side doors of the funeral home were flung open. We filed past the open casket where Mike looked the way we all remembered him. He died as a result of several falls he'd taken on his knees - prayer position you might say. Following knee surgery, a blood clot floated around his body until the day he died, at which point it entered his heart. His wife fortunately was with him when he died. They called 911 who did all they could.
The Lord, they believe, wanted him.
Standing on the cement patio at the funeral home, I remarked on the vast open spaces of Oklahoma. As far as the eye could see there was land. Flat land with scrubby plains grass and a few scattered trees. I know that Millard Grove Deming - "Mike" to everyone - appreciated every inch of ground and thanked God for the gift of being born.
I sure do!
