Mom loved animals, including the ones who wanted to kill her, like Bandit, the evil cat pictured above.

I discussed this and many of our disastrous family pet experiences at a storytelling show on Friday the 13th of April, 2018 at The Mark Twain House & Museum.

The show’s theme was: “It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time.”

The story may be heard here:

Fun Fact: Mom and Dad met on a Friday the 13th and their marriage ended in a terrible divorce and also produced my brother Dan!

*shudder*

CREEPY!

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You can see me right here.

I believe that because it’s a picture of Mom and Dad… 

and because the back of the photograph says, “Halloween 1980. I’m carrying Chris!”

And I’m Chris!

I also know that Halloween was my doctor’s original suggestion for my scheduled cesarean birth, but Mom objected to giving me Halloween as a birthday.

And since Halloween 1980 was on a Friday, I was born first thing in the morning on Monday, November third.

Which means Mom was REALLY pregnant when this picture was taken. Pregnant enough that she could’ve gone into labor at any moment.

Clearly, Mom had no reservations about possibly giving birth to me while dressed as a clown.

I don’t know what the average person’s odds are of entering this world from a surgeon urgently slicing into a clown’s womb, and I don’t know what to make about where my odds of that once stood.

I also don’t know what kind of offbeat parents would do this to a child.

Probably the kind that would decorate a child’s bedroom like this:

I don’t remember that clown but I do remember that yellow wall.

It looks like an insane asylum (the hospital gown doesn’t help), but Mom loved it.

She was very proud that they painted it themselves with, “yellow paint and dust busters instead of a brush.”

She always laughed when telling that story. It sort of changed her disposition like she was reliving some sort of free and tender moment where she had just left behind New York City in favor of Nowhere, Connecticut and, first newborn in tow, decided this is the energy she’d surround her children with.

It’s hard for me to imagine a version of Mom as innocent and carefree as she’d suggest, but then again it’s hard for me to imagine her dressed in a couples costume with Dad, and I was there!

Looking through my inherited photo albums, it’s striking to me just how much the times seem to have left their mark on Mom’s young spirit.

When I see pictures like this, I wonder how much different Mom might’ve been before I knew her.

And I think about the versions of myself my kids will never know because I can never again be as responsibility-free as Mom and I used to be.

How interesting it must’ve been to know Mom then, young and sitting in front of a waterfall, or happily posing beside her husband on Halloween of 1980 with a third baby on the way; before divorce and teenagers, ailing parents, and cancer.

And only three days before me.

——–

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The post I Could’ve Been Born to a Clown appeared first on Dumpster Full of Memories.

It’s strange hearing Mom’s eulogy exactly ten years after I gave it: through ears connected to the same brain that correctly assumed back then that life would never be the same.

I was 32-years-old when I gave that speech living paycheck-to-paycheck with my girlfriend in Austin, Texas and finally getting a little bit of traction in a career change into marketing.

Now, I’m married to that girlfriend with a house and family in Connecticut, hitting my mid-40s, and active with a national network of stay-at-home dads where I just spoke about finding poetry and whimsy in our shared lifestyle.

I couldn’t have predicted any of it, but it all seems to have made sense at the time.

I also never expected to hear the eulogy again after first sharing it.

I didn’t know the church audio system automatically recorded every time it was activated or that my Pastor would later offer me a copy. 

It’s a true blessing that the audio exists both to set a bar for my children when they hopefully one day eulogize me, and to let them hear throughout their lives proof of the love and affection that existed between their Grandma and me, and hopefully feel the ways it’s radiated through the way I’ve raised them.

Or they’ll listen to it and bust my balls over something like being so old that I used floppy disks as a child.

I’d be fine either way. It’s just cool to have.

The post Relistening to Mom’s Eulogy 10 Years Later appeared first on Dumpster Full of Memories.

Grief, like any living thing, will do whatever it takes to adapt and survive.

Right now, with a 4-year-old daughter and 2-year-old son who are each balls of enthusiasm, love, and joyful curiosity, grief is manifesting itself in the form of an overriding sadness that Mom never got to meet them, and that they never got to be loved by Mom.

They would have been her world.

–

Since I cannot change the circumstances of my sadness, the best remedy I can imagine is to ask as many people as possible who actually knew Mom to share something with the four grandchildren she never got to meet and with the two she loved completely.

You can share your remembrances however you want: writing, audio, video, or a Zoom interview with me – any means that might survive long enough for the next generation to appreciate the last.

The truth is that if you asked either of my kids who Judy Gaffney was, they would shrug. They know her only as, “Ghost Mom,” a phenomenon we mention when the lights flicker at an inopportune moment, or as, “Dada’s Mama, who was very nice and would have loved you.”

I plan to honor Mom in a few public-facing ways between now and the end of year to inspire memories and feelings from the loved ones she left behind. 

The highlight of this remembrance season will be a Christmas Party held in Mom’s honor for anyone who knew and loved her on Sunday, December 3, 2023, which would have been Mom’s 76th birthday.

We ended Mom’s funeral by singing her favorite Christmas carol, Silent Night, and will do so again at her party either by a campfire on my front lawn overlooking the reservoir at sunset, or (weather depending) fireside in my living room gathered around the artificial Christmas tree she would’ve insisted should be real.

——

The first public sharing I’ll offer is the namesake of this website, a story titled Dumpster Full of Memories, as delivered on June 18, 2017 at the Connecticut Historical Society as part of Speak Up Storytelling run by Elysha and Matthew Dicks.

The second public sharing will be the audio of Mom’s eulogy, which I will share shortly after listening to it on Tuesday, September 26, 2023, exactly 10 years after delivering it at West Avon Congregational Church. 

A few days after the service our Reverend surprised me with the news that their audio system had recorded the entire service, and offered me a copy, which I have listened to periodically over the past 10 years. 

It is a weird but oddly comforting thing to have, much as I hope any remembrances you share will be for my kids.

——–

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