Please help with Cremation cost

With a heavy heart, we regret to announce the passing of Larry Graves, 72 in Kokomo, IN on Dec 8th, 2022.

The circumstances surrounding Larry’s death are still undetermined.

Direct beneficiaries of your kind contribution are his daughter and grandchildren whom only seek to pay for the cost of a basic cremation.

My father passed 12/8/2022

You were a wild man. A force to be reckoned with. A person who embodied the spirit and era of a time long gone.

A wild man/ a hippie / a dreamer / a thinker / a gardener/ an adventurous soul / a hard working hard living man / a complex man / a loving grandfather and father / a lost man.

Somewhere between the wide open spaces and those tiny, secret places in my heart I will always carry you.

The sounds of Rock and Roll, Blues and temple chimes mingle with incense, chlorine and nonsense until even the air has to smile in remembrance.

So many memories. Good and Bad as if a clear cut distinction exists when talking about the threads that weave who you grow into as a person.

How did my hippie ass parent not kill us?

I remember you asking me if I was your pretty girl, nice girl, smart girl and me being the shit I was laughing and exclaiming no ugly, mean dumb!

I will fondly hold onto watching Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons with you, our early morning drive to school listening to the Bob and Tom show. Reading letters you would mail me when I was away at school in Kansas. Our cross country trips. Summers spent trying to hit as many camp grounds as possible and EVERY amusement park.

Oh those countless nights of listening to your ghost stories around the fire. And the agony of you forcing us to hike FOREVER. (Probably a mile or so but we had short legs)

Your culinary skills growing up were second to none. Even though you would comment that I was like a bird who might blow away. You encouraged us to do sports (even though we were horrible, I speak for myself) and was Justin’s number one little league fan.

Wild Kat basketball games. You took us kids to every single high school basket ball game because you embodied our hometown sports ball spirit.

And nobody can tell how or why, because the words never come out the same. Might as well try counting fireflies in a jar till you think you know how many there are, as we kids grew how things changed. How everyone changed and evolved.

“I always love you”, as the sound of temple bells play softly, behind a music that never tells a fragment of what you felt, of what you knew. A formula, a phrase remains,—but there is lost.

Our cartoons and games and amusement parks became concerts, and extended travels to other countries. Our adventures became vast both at home and abroad.

The pool you put in behind our house and then bet we wouldn’t swim being that it was finished on Easter day. We were blue and numb from freezing after jumping in once! The mopeds you suped up for us to drive until we graduated to cars. The forcing us to get jobs and encouraging us to learn that hard work is the way.

The religious phase, the Grateful Dead phase, the Harley custom motorcycles phase, the speed boat phase.

The boat! So many good times. And then time you refused to come in during a massive thunderstorm and blasted AC/DC Thunderstruck while Just and I were certain we were going to be electrocuted.

Your love of the Three Stooges and Benny Hill, and the Twilight Zone.

Our endless string of pets. We might have been a petting zoo at one time. Cats, dogs, mice, hamsters, your big ass fish tank, a raccoon, ferrets, the big tropical parrots you would proudly claim could bite your finger off.

I won’t allow myself to think of you as gone. Your journey has just begun. Our time together held so many facets. The music you introduced us to with jam sessions, the films you gifted us the pleasure to watch with you. The countless projects we benefited from you “just getting into, cause bored.” I still have several beautiful soft aphagans, and random collections of songs and poems you wrote.

I’ll just think of you as resting from the sorrows and the hardships in a place of warmth and comfort where there are no days and years.

I will think of you going on your next long strange trip. I hope you find Teresa and Kirt to keep you company.

Your death has left a homesickness in me. A profound longing not for places but more for different moments in time we shared.

You were a doting and loving grandfather. You adored your grandkids. I desperately wish they would have known you in your prime. They had their cherished time with you, equally as special, but if they only could have known you then as well. Who you were then. The entire story of you. But I’m sure there are others whom feel the same way regarding me.

I missed out on your childhood exploits, and teen years other than it was hard at times in Tennessee. I rarely heard you speak of your time in Vietnam but was beyond proud of your service even if I didn’t express it enough to you. We were and are so very proud.

In this radical acceptance of life's chaotic absurdity I desperately seek to understand.

Declaring against all material dogma what it may all mean. There is no objective meaning to be found. No complete answers to the questionable.

Only fractal truths within the unfathomable.

We can never know it all and in this I struggle to find acceptance.

We list statistics to convince, we explain the why, the who, the what.

But we can never fully explain to the after.

Nothing can explain the ripples in our time, the tears, the random pauses in speech I know I will deal with when speaking of you.

The deep breaths before saying it, The raw desperation of acceptance.

It feels like listening to nothing right after hearing the most profound piece of music.

It's the craving of hearing your voice again. And playing back an old voice mail again and again.

When I see you again ( I will - it’s the waiting that’s the hardest part- Tom Petty) when you and I are together again, I will tell you everything you have missed. And how you have been missed so much.

I feel so very small by the enormous loss of you. My patchwork dad of the simian world, designed by a dysfunctional god with a bad hangover, wicked sense of wonderlust, and brilliant sense of humor.