The process of getting a headstone

This picture makes me smile every time I see it--it is a picture with so much love bursting from both of them. That look she is giving her daddy...

There have been a lot of questions regarding Laila's headstone so I thought I'd post something on here in case you are all wondering.

First, we try to visit Laila about every other week. I'd like to go more but it's about 30 minutes away so by the time we get there and back, it's past the boys bedtime and it just makes it hard to get there.

A lot of people have asked when her headstone is coming. We haven't even ordered one yet. There are obviously a lot of things I never even considered until Laila passed away. The process of buying a headstone is one of them. When we went to look at headstones we found out that they are really expensive. In fact, the cheapest one costs almost more than all the other funeral services combined. We are planning on buying a cheaper one because we don't know where we are going to be retiring and we are planning on moving her when we settle down somewhere and moving the headstone would not be economical. When we do settle down we will move her to a place where we will buy a plot for all of us to be buried together, with a nicer headstone at that point.

Mike has purchased life insurance on each of us in the family. The kids all have $10,000 on them. We first have to have the coroners office do the autopsy (the results just came back). This took about nine weeks. Next, we have to get the death certificate, which can't come until the autopsy report was finished. Then, the death certificate gets sent to the insurance and we wait until the money comes. With that money, we pay ourselves back for the money we spent on the funeral. I am so thankful for Mike's job and that we live in such a way that we had money to pay for all the expenses. Things have been tight, but we have not been hurting too bad. When the money comes we will go choose a nice, but somewhat cheaper headstone. Then it will take awhile for them to get the granite (some of them come from India even) and then they have to etch the design we choose, and then finally, deliver and install the headstone at the cemetery.

Since we just got the autopsy report we are at the beginning of this process so it will still be a long time until Laila has a headstone. When we get one, we will let you all know.

**Today we went to visit Laila at the cemetery and found that she has a little neighbor now. Sad, and strange.