celebration of life

Chris Knight's avatar

On the night after Dad’s passing, Anita (my sister), my aunt and uncle and I went through a ton of old photographs to use in the video that the funeral home would put together for the tribute that would play during visitation on the following night. Wilkerson Funeral did a very solid job in doing so and I wanted to share it on my blog.




I don’t want to say which one, but there is one photo in here that seriously broke my heart to include. It was Dad’s favorite photograph. It hung on the wall of his knife shop. Heck, it was the knife shop, the heart and soul of it. We knew we wanted it in the video, but it honestly hurt me to take it down on the morning before the visitation that night. It was like taking out the last lingering vestige of Dad’s presence from ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

I don’t know how else to put it, but there are some things that happened at Dad’s funeral that despite the occasion were an amazing delight.  And I truly believe that Dad would have had no small measure of pride if he could somehow know that this celebration of his life brought so many wonderful people together to celebrate not only his own life, but also of the most precious things in all our lives.

During the service I spoke a few words about Dad and since the other ministers were sharing stories from his life, I did likewise and related some tales of how forgiving and relenting – even if he didn’t understand what the heck I was doing – of the many stunts that I pulled during the life that we shared.  One of them was during the filming of Forcery: my first (and Lord willing still ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

Yesterday was supposed to have be one of the saddest days of my entire
life. Yet here I am after Dad’s funeral and I cannot help but
feel like the most blessed, most overwhelmed with joy, most hopeful
man in the world.

Mom and Dad’s grave site,
the morning after Dad’s funeral

This entire time, I believe Dad would have felt
honored by every aspect of it. Anita and I had Dad dressed in his
denim bib overalls, with a red plaid flannel workshirt beneath and in
his right hand, just as it was often poised in life, his smoking pipe.
He had often told Anita that if she had him wearing a tie he would come
back to haunt her, LOL. Last night during the visitation we had a table
set up displaying some of the many knives that he hand-made over the
years. That was my aunt’s idea, ...

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