Laughter During A Race....What?

Joey's funeral yesterday (Saturday) was absolutely beautiful.  It was so healing to say goodbye in an environment where people were constantly talking about how inspired they were by his life.  It was a very positive experience.  I needed to see his parents...to hug them and whisper in their ears that I was so sorry for their loss.  When I hugged Joey's mom, she told me that I was his first love as a childhood friend.  That is how inseparable we were.

The funeral started with a slideshow of pictures of Joey's life.  The one picture I will remember from that is of Joey riding a Wal-Mart cart...you know, the motorized ones...wearing a Batman shirt and a child's bike helmet.  That was Joey.  He had quite the sense of humor.  Through the tears I was able to share a fun story about Joey during the funeral.  We went on a family trip to Canada with his family and stayed at a fishing camp.  Off the shore of the camp was a remote little island.  Somehow we convinced our parents to let us spend the night on the island all by ourselves.  So they packed us up after dinner and drove us out to the island.  We had a fun evening with a campfire and good conversation.  But as the sun went down and night set in we realized that mosquitoes were infesting our area.  We were covered in mosquitoes.  We tried hard to yell across the lake for our parents and use our flashlights to get their attention, but that didn't work.  We tried to hide in our sleeping bags and keep the mosquitoes out, but that didn't work either.  Finally, at sunrise, someone heard our call and came and got us.  We had been awake all night and kind of had a miserable time.  But looking back on that story we decided it was pretty funny.  We named that place "Mosquito Island."  As we left the funeral and got in the car, guess what was buzzing around the car.....a mosquito!  When we got home from the funeral that afternoon, I put a picture of Joey on our refrigerator.  Mya came over and looked at it and asked who it was.  Now all week I had been telling the girls about Joey.  But when Mya saw the picture she said, "Mom, you didn't tell me he was in a wheelchair."  His disability was never in the way of who Joey was to me.

To end the weekend I ran a race this morning in Wooster.  It was a trail run and three of us were tethered together.  Imagine running through the woods, on rough terrain, and having a single file line of three people close together.  It was crazy!  We all three ran a 5K together and it was the funniest thing.  We laughed so hard to the point that we had trouble running.  One girl was leading the pack and could see the course clearly, I was in the middle trying to see in front, but not succeeding at that.  And our final girl was in the back having no clue what she was running on or what was coming up in front of her.  It was a crazy experience.  After the first 5K, we dropped our lead person and two of us ran another 5K together.  After that one, she dropped me off and she finished a final 5K by herself.  We ended up placing 4th out of 18 teams.  I was impressed with that pace because of all the laughing going on. The race was to benefit raising money to cure ALS.  Below is a picture of my team.