KGattis
Dec 7, 20172 min read
Pumpkin Carols
Great Pumpkin is Coming to Town Oh, you better not shriek, You better not groan, You better not howl, You better not Moan, Great Pumpkin...
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Chris' Eulogy
I would like to thank everyone for attending today to celebrate the life of my husband Christopher Scott Gattis. I know that many of you had to travel a long distance to be here today and if Chris were here today he would be incredibly humbled to see all of you. Chris was an incredible man that no one can replace. It is going to be difficult to put into words how much he meant to me and how much I will miss him.
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When I met him I was freshly divorced and new at to the job at GTE. We were on the same team at work. Our supervisor Larry was hired as a supervisor and had never done our job so he was no help. Consequently the team really did have to pull together and help each other while he was off ogling the blonde on the other side of the building. Chris' specialty was the internet. GTE had just started selling internet and it was the big push. I had been listening to his voice on the other side of the room for a while and when I sold my first internet I was told to have Chris take a look to make sure I had filled out the paperwork right. Most people on our team sold one or two internet accounts a week. I sold an account every day for a solid month in hopes of gettings Chris' attention. It worked. While we were dating I had to go to court to fight my custody battle with my ex over Kirk. Chris proposed like 3 days later. I couldn't even think about getting that serious so I told him not to ask again for at least 6 months. 6 months later almost to the day we got engaged.
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Chris was an incredible husband & father. I had told him he was not to parent my son while we were dating so he didn't. He asked for permission to start acting like he was Kirk's dad when we were on the train on the way home from our Honeymoon at Hearst Castle. Kirk was 5, almost 6. From that moment on he considered Chris his son. We were married for 5 years before Jenny came into our lives. With each of the girls Chris held them first. Not that he waited to hold them to fall in love with them. He would lay with his head on my pregnant stomach and sing when I'm 64 while softly rubbing my belly.
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We were together for 18 years. We rarely fought.Even when we did we never raised our voices at each other. We couldn't afford to go out on dates for over 10 straight years so we watched movies in our room after the kids were asleep. We would stay up talking until it was time to get up and keep going on caffeine alone. Sometimes while I breast fed one of the babies he would make a quick run to the grocery store and get us each a pint of Haagen Daz or Ben and Jerry's to eat during these cheap dates.
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Chris would have made a great Computer Engineer. He was told that by many men in the field during his life but he never had the finances to pursue that. It was the plan when we got engaged but my elevator accident 9 days later changed our lives forever. He never had the real chance to dedicate time and energy to his education but he read constantly. Our later night talks were often thought experiments about social experiments and whether or not this change or that change would have made history different. If this historical figure survived the thing that killed him in our reality how would our world change. Nanobots, time machines.
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I have seen Chris miserable after not sleeping for 3 days or so at a time with his mind racing over every fault he saw in himself, sure even his friends didn't really care for him and trying to figure out what long con I was on because he didn't deserve anything good in his life. I have lived with him medicated to handle that depression but asleep 20 hours a day because of the strength of the medication it took to contain that much depression. I know he would have fought a bear to distract it in hopes that the kids and I would get away but he didn't feel worthy of love or respect. He carried great demons form his youth. Even with 18 years of marriage I doubt I know them all.But he is at peace. The broken leg, the diabetes, the heart disease, even the slightly receding hairline all these health problems are behind him.
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I was blessed to share those 18 years with him. I am also grateful that an hour or so before he died I had a chance to call him from the hospital. I had been brought back in with Sepsis and the team at the hospital was concerned for my life. The doctor had just come through and told me that my most recent blood test showed great improvement and there was a good chance to believe I would be coming home the next day. I called to share the news with him while I had time to myself and he was up in our room. Kirk had gone in his room so Chris had gone to our room to go on the computer. The girls' were all at school so we had a final gift, a half hour alone on the phone to express our love to each other, to talk about how grateful we were to be together and for each of the 4 kids. Its estimated he was dead within about an hour. I will hold onto that last conversation as the precious Gem that it is to me. Chris, if your somewhere you can hear me. You were a wonderful Husband, a caring and nurturing Father, an amazing Lover and my best friend. I Love You So Much.
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END
I love my apartment - I complain to much because getting 4 kids to do their chores is like nailing jello to a tree but I stand by my statement that this is the promised land. Looking back every bit of the pain and fear we went through during our 6 months of homelessness was worth it to get to this apartment, to this community, to this ward.
I love my children - which is good cause I ain't putting any of them back where they came from. They each have their strengths and challenges but to me they are perfection in progress.
I still love my late husband - I still break into little pieces sobbing in my room after the kids are asleep sometimes, its getting to be less often but he was so supportive and loving, so wise, he had agoraphobia for years and couldn't leave the room most of it but he would read science journals and news reports and keep his brain going. He had a blank black book we bought him called with the title My Plans for World Domination on the cover in gold. I read it after his death. He used the premise of having a time machine and studied which famous deaths - MLK, JFK... had to stand as a fixed point in time or lose the movement they stood for and which assassinations he felt he could stop. He created a world in there where he put everyone in the world but him in suspended animation which he admitted would make him the biggest criminal ever because he wasn't going to ask. He would infect everyone with nanobots that would go through removing all cancer, disease, mental illness, birth defects - he had to decide that some conditions like high functioning autism were necessary to continue since looking at things from a different wiring is how we make progress. While this was going on all the over fished and over hunted populations could recover. He set robots mining asteroids and made every human a share holder in that business so everyone had a base income enough to live comfortably.
When we thought I might get a decent settlement from the elevator accident we planned out how to find out which banks held the mortgages on each of our family members houses and we would buy the loan and give them their deed no strings attached for Christmas.
He wanted so little for himself and so much for mankind. I have to move on. I want to feel that kind of love again. He won't be an easy act to follow.
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I love my sister and her family - I would not have said this a few years ago. Part of my mothers mental illness is she had to keep Kari and I hating each other and then would use it as part of her poor me for not quiting smoking and going back to the Temple or any other changes. She would "vent" to me about Kari making up all sorts of abuses that never happened and then go to Kari and tell her how mean and abusive I am. We both felt protective of her and therefore at war with each-other. After she died we sat around swapping stories with her siblings and found out all the stories she had told us about growing up were lies too. Most families have very little to do with each other once the parents that connected them are gone - Kari and I have never gotten along better.
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