She Lives - Tragic Comedy at Funeratic

She Lives


Galactic Domination by Lori Lancaster

Graaa.

Welp. 2011 was interesting. I've been rather quiet I know... Half way in the year my Grandfather lost his fight with Cancer (he was in his early 90's) but he has lived a rather long and productive life. Its sorta funny in a way since he lived for quite a few years AFTER the doctors said he had. I received the call/notice when I was at Acen. I went fully knowing that my Grandpa would probably pass and knowing that I needed something to distract me as well... He wasn't really 'there' anymore (a change from when I had seen him a couple months earlier) and since I've always been close, I really needed something to help keep my mind off things. My only regret is that I wasn't able to dig into my photographs to bring a selection from the 70s-20xx for sharing at his wake. I would have preferred to have those available as I think they would have complemented the family pictures Molly had brought along in filling in some gaps:) We drove straight there from Rosemont (we left early Sunday). Since the place we went to was in Aurora -anyone familiar with IL will know how far away Rosemont - Aurora is and how far Rosemont to where we live is... Since I had to be there at a *very* specific time, it became impossible to go home first. The ironic thing was that just a few weeks before that I had considered uploading a bunch of pictures to Flickr / Facebook to share with the family.

Long story short, I'm still collecting pictures (on and off) as I want to make a memorial vid to go along with an 'interview' I did when I was in 4th grade of my Grandfather. The plan I had decided upon was to take that audio, and have various pictures of my grandfather (and possibly his p's) serving as the source material for the video feed. Since this is all in Spanish and I have experience subtitling I was then going to subtitle it into English. The final step is to probably upload this onto Youtube as a means to send it to family members and allow other family that I'm not familiar with/in contact with to view it as well.

How can I have family I'm not familiar with? Easy. My dad is the oldest of 4, I have 10 cousins between his sister and brothers. That is not even counting the kids that Molly and Lorie have between them (they are my Grandfathers daughters as well :D ). My grandfather is one of SEVERAL children. Over 9 I believe- some might have been twins? I think. I have met a few of them. Each has a few kids.... makes for a very nice and large catholic family. I kid you not when I say we once walked into a random grocery store in Mexico and my dad met up with a 3rd or 4th cousin completely out of the blue. HUGE family.

I have 2 big roadblocks... 1) getting the audio onto the computer without having a cassette player that I am 100% positive works. 2) potential for being on an emotional roller-coaster. Just stumbling across an old Christmas card my grandpa had sent a few years back last week put me into tears. Not sure how hearing his voice again will affect me. Especially on the constant repeat I will need to translate it. Not to mention the time it will take to properly sync/time the subs. A 30 min episode of Sailor Moon took me 2 hours to time properly.

If I can do this though, I think it would be a fitting tribute to him and allow a piece of him to remain forever. To the best of my knowledge, I am the only one to have ever done something like this with my grandpa. Hurray for random school assignments.

If I remember correctly this tape is around 45minutes to an hour and also includes 3 folktales on the flipside. 1 is the story of La llororna (a weeping woman who searches for her children late at night. Hearing her cries means you will die.
2. The story of how the mountains/hills came to being 3. A story about a man who carries a lantern. He asks people for the time and when they respond he tells them that now they know what time they died at -then he kills them with a machette or a sickle I think. There might be a 4th one dealing with the founding of Mexico City. My grandpa loved telling stories.

–Lori Lancaster • January 6 2012, 11:15pm EST

D'oh, I missed this at the time... And now is maybe not the best time to say anything about your grandfather's passing, given what else is going on (don't know if you want it known here)... But I think the memorial video is a great idea, a way to express feelings that just don't come out in words and a good way to preserve the memories. Your family would love it and pass it on to those remote family members who are so distant you don't really know them. We all have those relatives I guess; some of us just have more of them than others. If Kelly can't name every last person in her huge family, there's no way I'll ever learn them all.

I'm a sucker for ghost stories anyway, but the folktale of La Llorona has stuck with me ever since American Family did a great pair of episodes about it, contrasting the legend with a modern story about an immigrant woman separated from her children by immigration officials.

–Scott Hardie • January 28 2012, 9:24am EST

On te subject of knowledge of other stuff, Id apprecoate disgression as one never knows whom is watching, and while other methods arent uber secure, there are a few more safeguards than on a blog and nifty website, and I can be overly cautious about such things

–Lori Lancaster • January 29 2012, 3:38am EST

Dumb touch screens. :p

–Lori Lancaster • January 29 2012, 3:38am EST