Change Is Hard

…but change is certain.

Tag Archives: funeral


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Remembering a good man

Max Ziegler died June 7th. He was 87 years old. He was also my cousin, someone I feel like I’ve known all my life. We didn’t hang out a lot together, there was an 18 year gap in our ages, and my first hazy memory of him is at his wedding when he married my cousin Carol. I think I was 8.

Carol and Max had three sons, and periodically as we were all growing up they’d come to our house or we’d go to theirs, mostly for holiday meals. But what I remember most about those days when they visited us is while all the adults were talking around the kitchen table, Max was down at the lake with his three boys fishing for sunfish off the shore.

Spending time with his kids was his all time favorite thing to do.

In fact moments like those are the majority of my memories of Max — thoroughly engaged with his children and grandchildren, laughing with friends and family.

He had the biggest smile.

He and I were both branch managers at banks when I was a young adult. He always had a story to tell about life at the bank, but his stories seemed more fun than my experiences. I know now that it wasn’t that our jobs were that different, it’s just that he saw his job as more joyful than I ever imagined mine could be.

That’s how he viewed the world. Joyfully. And he spread it around wherever he went.

He stayed active as a volunteer until almost the end, at Meals on Wheels and at the Kiwanis thrift shop. There’s a whole community he built around sharing his joy and you could see it in the sons and grandchildren that spoke at his funeral, and in the members of his beloved Kiwanis club who also spoke. You saw the joy that was Max in the almost 200 people that packed the funeral home on a Monday afternoon.

And as I left the service I looked up at the electric blue sky filled with puffy white clouds and I smiled. Because I knew Max was smiling too. I’m sure there was a huge crowd up there joyfully welcoming him home.

As they said at the service, the best way we can honor this incredible man is to live our own lives with joy. And to spread it around in a Max-like fashion. One of his youngest granddaughters told us the world would be a better place if it had more Maxes.

So let’s see if we can make that happen, let’s spread the joy just like Max did for all of his 87 years.


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It’s not goodbye

I’ve been thinking about the best way to share this, some eloquent words that capture the loss our family experienced this week. But there is no easy way.

My last post, Wordless Wednesday is an image I captured in May when my aunt and I were walking through Hudson Mills Park. She was looking for dogwood and trillium. I was trying to capture as much of the experience as she’d let me.

Which means most of my images were taken from behind.

We walked slower this spring than we had the year before, took the shorter trails, gauged whether a hill was too steep or manageable. We stopped to rest on convenient benches more often. There was, after all, no hurry. In fact there was more savoring the moments because we both knew it was our last spring together.

She’d been diagnosed with a terminal cancer and she had chosen not to take any treatment. They told her she’d have a good summer, and, right on schedule, she did.

My sister and brother came up, then my sister came up two more times. We visited her as often as we could. We attended her last symphony, brought her simple suppers rather than expecting the elaborate meals she has made for us our entire lifetimes. We swam with her at her community pool, walked in her beloved Mathi gardens and the University of Michigan Arboretum.

On our last visit, she sat in a wheelchair, pulling sheets of music for my sister and me to play, music she had written when her children were small. She sang along. We played music until she seemed tired, and then we talked just a bit. “Say Hi to Dad,” my sister said, “He’ll surely be waiting for you.”

It was a gift, she said, that she had these past months to spend with her children, with us, with her friends. And so that she could plan and arrange to make things as easy as possible for her family to carry on without her.

We all cried a bit, and then had a long, last hug.

This past Monday morning she left us to say hi to her brother, my dad, and to her husband, her mother, my mother, and so many other family members who had gone on ahead. And on Saturday we all said “see you later” at the most beautiful funeral I’ve ever attended.

She had, of course, planned it all, including her own words to all of us, the hymns to be sung, the prelude and postlude played by the incredible pianist, and the bagpipes played by my sister.

The time she spent with us was our gift as well. She was a gift to all of us, her family, her friends, musicians in her beloved symphony, her neighbors, the students she taught, the community band in which she played.

I can’t be sad, though I will miss her so much; she had a wonderful and joyous homecoming on Monday morning. And, as someone said at the funeral, she’s probably up there organizing heaven right now.

Thanks for all the good times, good meals, good conversation and good company, Aunt Becky. I’ll see you on down the road.