I write.

I know this blog is desperate need of baby cuteness. That will come soon enough. Abigail has been taught all kinds of tricks since we've been here. Including how to shake her head no. Just what I need, another defiant child.

But now I need to sleep because tomorrow is Poppy's funeral. I just can't believe this is happening sometimes. I keep expecting to enter a room and see him standing there. I loved watching him hold my babies. I swear I can remember him holding me like that. I know I must have a very good memory, because I honestly do remember being held by him in the dining room of his old house, and him singing, "You are so beautiful to me...". I was never 100% certain if that was a real memory or if I just made it up in my head. Then a few years ago he sent me a music box that played that song. He told me he used to sing that to me when I was a baby.

I know death is part of life. I know it's not even the end of life. I know our spirits are eternal. And that does bring me comfort. But gosh it hurts so much. The world feels like a different place without him in it. And I guess in my world, it is. It's a paradigm shift.

Poppy told me several times of several instances he really should have been dead in Korea. One time he was in a foxhole with his best friends on Christmas Eve. He had to go to the bathroom so he got up and left. When he came back a grenade had been thrown into the foxhole and all three friends were killed. Had he stayed, of course he would have been gone too. Another time a bullet went through the head of another good friend standing next to him. Poppy happened to step out of the way at the exact right moment, so the bullet avoided going through his head as well. (He then carried that man down a mountain, and got him to the medical helicopter, and saved his life.) He questioned why so many times his life was spared. He didn't think he was better than any of his brothers who lost their life in combat. Why was he saved. And I know it was because without him I wouldn't be here! Or any of my cousins, or aunts, or even my children. And then he was granted 82 years on this earth to help shape each of us into the adults we are today. And he literally lived every single one of those days.

Did you know Poppy collapsed a lung at age 80 because he was shoveling snow for his neighbors?

He took us on vacation to Washington, DC and he was the oldest there by many years, and yet we were all struggling to keep up with him.

His feet were almost amputated because of severe frostbite. Hours before the operation the color began to come back to his feet, and they him keep them. And I'm sure in recent years he may have been wishing they had just cut them off because they were such a source of pain for him. And even with that pain he worked every single day.

The day he died he pulled weeds at his daughters house. He walked down the stairs and got into the car himself, hours before he left this life. Poppy really is my hero. I don't think I'll ever stop blogging about him, sorry.