Who matches the socks?

I am remembering more things about Boyce's funeral.

Jeanelle and Jim Livingston, Ramona Easthope and Bishop Stewart Lang all spoke.

I would say that the one outstanding memory of their combined talks centred around Elmoyne. Boyce was born in the 1950’s, in a time when Downs Syndrome children were institutionalized, rather than integrated into families. Elmoyne was one of the women who believed there was a different way, and while she would have had very little support in the way of literature or social services, she forged forward to give Boyce a life inside of the Johnson family.

Did you ever play chess with Boyce?

There were stories of him learning to set the table and that he was meticulous about it. We discovered that he was the one who paired up the socks in the laundry and that he chased down people who only put one of their socks into the wash.

We learned about Boyce’s bank account, about his piano lessons, about the first sacramental prayer that he gave and about his job performance once he got out of school.

It was a lovely funeral.

I liked the fact that it was held in the ward where Boyce grew up. Many of the ward members came to pay their respect. They were old for they had to be 20 years older than Boyce to have been there and watched him on Sundays -- first as a child, then as a teen-ager and then as an adult.

Richard, Miranda and their three children came down from Calgary to the funeral. Virginia and Cammy were there, as was Corrine McBride, Michelle Ehlrich and Aunt Martha’s daughter, Rosamond. And of course, many of the extended family of Grant and Elmoyne were there and participated in giving prayers or being pallbearers.

At the lunch after the funeral, I connected up with many people, one of which was Judy Whitehead, a woman I went to university with in Edmonton. I haven’t seen her since then and so we had to compress 50 years apart into 5 minutes of conversation.

Can life have gone by that fast?

But life went by fast for Boyce who was only 59 years old.  Lucky me to have met Boyce when he was a baby.

Arta