"Her death was the result of a vicious attack by a renegade pack of Miniature Schnauzers," the obituary reads. "With her bulldog, Bella, at her side, she fought gallantly."
It's OK. You're supposed to laugh.
Jennifer Anne Church's death from a rare colo-rectal cancer Monday was no joke, but Church believed in finding a chuckle anywhere you can ? even on the obituary page of The Roanoke Times.
So, go ahead. Laugh. It's what she wanted.
Church, who was 48, and her husband, Mark, agreed a year ago that her cause of death would be treated humorously and metaphorically in her obit, which ran in the newspaper this week. And Mark, director of Career and Technical Education for Franklin County Schools, didn't let her down. He delivered a memorial that forces grins even amid the grief.
"It's a metaphor of a vicious disease that nips at you and nips at you until you die," Mark Church said. Jen Church did, in fact, have her bulldog Bella at her side throughout her two-year battle with cancer.
Those who knew Church have told her husband the obit hit the mark, and a few who didn't know her said they wished they had.
Not everyone has gotten the joke, though. Flora Funeral Service in Rocky Mount, which handled the funeral arrangements and obituary, has received a few calls wondering if someone had hacked into their computer system and played a prank.
One person wrote to Church, suggesting angrily that the obit was cruel.
"We're celebrating her life and the manner in which it was lived, with laughter and humor," Mark Church replied.
That's just how his family is, he said.
"We are laughing, we're spending our time reminiscing, talking old stories. We're doing our share of grieving and crying, but most of it's laughing," he said. "What she taught me over the years was, you've got to have humor in everything you do. You can never take yourself so seriously."
It was, in fact, Jen Church's idea to write her obit as it appeared. She was a registered nurse for 30 years in Harrisonburg, Lynchburg and Roanoke, and it was from a patient that she got the idea. The patient told her that anybody who knows you well knows how you died, so he said he died of an alligator attack.
She and Mark decided to go with dogs instead of an alligator. He wanted "wiener dogs" to make it absolutely clear it was a joke, but they settled on schnauzers after recalling a particularly yappy one they had for a neighbor when they first married.
It was perfectly consistent with Jen Church's outlandish and outsized sense of humor.
This is a woman who, when the couple's children were small, informed him it was his turn to change a diaper with a "code brown" alert.
Christmas stockings might be filled with anything in the Church house ? a bar of soap, your own dirty socks, or something nice she wanted for herself.
She liked going on cruises, touring wineries and "retail therapy."
Church fell ill in fall 2009, and in February 2010 was diagnosed with cancer.
She was upfront about how she wanted her death handled. No formal, traditional funeral, for one thing.
The bit about the schnauzers was required.
An in lieu of flowers, she wanted friends to send bottles of wine to her family with notes about her attached. Her obit even offers the name and number of a friend's wine shop, The Laker Beverage and Tobacco, to help out.
"Flowers die," Mark Church said. "They're pretty, and most people think that's tradition. But I'm a husband living in a house by himself. I get a bunch of vases."
He can't do much with those.
But with bottles of wine, he and their children and friends can uncork one once in a while, pour a round and read the attached note.
They can hoist their glasses and say, "Here's to Jen!"
And, of course, they can have a laugh.
Source: http://www.roanoke.com/news/roanoke/wb/303122
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