Today, on the feast day of St. Joseph, my Joe was honored by his celebration of life 3 years ago. We had the service as quickly as we could with COVID still kind of lingering and Joe having died out of state, away from home. That complicates things more than you would realize. Luckily, the fact that he was a veteran and a first responder, that allowed him to be put to the top of the list for many services needed to get him home to Michelle. So many at that time had to have services without the person being honored even present, and we didn’t want an empty casket or an empty urn. We wanted Joe to actually be present…so we had to wait a bit. When I think back on that place and time, I think of the hundreds and hundreds of people who came from all walks of Joe’s life to honor him. I was so overwhelmed at the sheer numbers of people. In his short life, he had touched so many. If people were there to support the family and maybe didn’t know Joe as well, they did after hearing Zac (his best friend), Rich (his dad), and Michelle (his wife) speak about him. He was able to touch so many people through their words. He was such a good man….a total goofball, but a good man. He is still loved and missed dearly today.
It has been 3 years since my Joe died. In one minute, it feels like forever and another like it certainly can’t even be my reality. I am going to quote a friend of mine here who lost her husband a few years ago and say, “The world is less beautiful, yet more beautiful.” I loved that line and although I am seeing the world through the shadow of grief, I can still see it and enjoy the rainbows, the mountains, the wildlife. It isn’t as vibrant and technicolor like it was before, but I can still appreciate it.
The past two years on this day, we have gathered with Joe’s closest friends: his wife, Michelle, his best friend, Zac, and his friends from the Olathe Fire Department, his Missouri Army National Guard brothers, his high school and college friends, and his fraternity brothers from Delta Chi. One year we had an open house at our place in Omaha, and last year we met at a restaurant in Kansas City. It was kind of a lot of added stress organizing these events when we are grieving parents. This year, God offered us a different option. The wonderful person who normally cooks dinner for our monthly fire department association meetings had surgery a week or so ago. She asked me ahead of time if I would take care of dinner for the March meeting. I never even looked at the date, just agreed to take it off her plate. When I saw it would be March 6th, I realized that it was the PERFECT way to honor our Joe. When Joe graduated from OFD’s fire academy and got his regular assignment to station 1, he was a probationary fire fighter. That means a lot of things but at the fire station, it meant not sitting at the table until you were invited. It meant doing all the yucky jobs no one else wanted to do. It meant not being able to sit in the main room in the loungers and watch TV during down time….until you are invited to do so. One of those jobs he was tasked with from the start was cooking for his crew. At Station 1, that meant 2 crews…so normally 8-9 people. They thought it would be a punishment. He loved it. I can’t tell you how many times I got a call or text from him asking for a screen shot from my recipe book so he could make that for dinner for his guys that night. He wanted to expand their palates and make Japanese curry or Tuscan chicken. He would come home to visit and even cook for us every now and then, which was always fun. How blessed am I that all three of my kids are great in the kitchen and good cooks! Anyhow, we’ll be cooking for our fire department tonight and honoring Joe in the process.
Speaking of Joe….we have often mentioned we feel closest to him when out on a call with the fire department. We are carrying on his legacy and being his hands in this world doing the thing he loved most. I was dreading waking up this morning with the reality of what today signifies. Joe didn’t give me the opportunity to wallow this morning. We were jolted awake at 0445 to a medical call with the fire department. I was concentrating on getting there safely, taking care of the patient and then charting. I could feel Joe so strongly as I stood outside in the cold, crisp air, in the dark with the stars twinkling above, waiting for the ambulance staff to finish assessing the patient in the ambulance before leaving for the hospital. That is going to make today rather long, but hopefully a nap can get snuck in at some point. I am wearing Joe’s firefighter memorial shirt under my own volunteer fire department sweatshirt. They are working in tandem today.
I also wear this necklace everyday and a gold band on my right hand ring finger that has Joe’s thumb print engraved on the outside of it and his name engraved on the inside. Of course, Rich and I both each have a tattoo to remember Joe inked into our skin as well. We may not have a scholarship named for Joe, or a golf tournament, a 10K race or a clinic/school in Africa honoring him like some of our grieving friends do. But we are honoring him every day with what we do. We are living our lives to the fullest as we believe he would want us to do. He always did! We honor Joe with every call or task we are called upon to do with our volunteer fire department within our community. I think Joe would be tickled that we are doing this. What a gift he has given us – that in honoring him, we are able to do such cool things. This would have never been on our radar if we weren’t trying to honor him. We knew it was a sign when we were told this volunteer fire department was number 13….Joe’s birthday.
We will go to the park in town and sit on his memorial bench today. We left today pretty open other than cooking dinner tonight for the fire department. Some of our friends have already reached out to us this morning and I want to thank you for doing so. Our Joe is never truly gone if we continue to tell his stories and speak his name. I live for those moments. Yes, there may be tears, but many of them are in gratitude for having him in my life.
After our cruise along the Baja Peninsula in Mexico, we stayed a couple of days in San Diego, watching a game at UC Irvine vs UCSD (where Tim coaches) and then spending a day at the San Diego Zoo. Here are a few photos of Tim doing what he loves most: sports performance coaching with basketball.
We had a blast spending some time at the San Diego Zoo, which now has two panda bears in residence. The weather is almost always amazing in San Diego. It is a must to spend time outside.
After the zoo we went to the beach to watch the sunset. Here are a few photos with our last few hours spent with Tim before dropping him off at home so he could get some work done. We left early the next morning. He’ll be coming to visit us in Montana in the third week of March, after the season is over.
Today, February 25th, 2025, is my dad’s 78th birthday. Growing up, my dad was gone a lot. He worked very hard at his job as an officer in the U.S. Army. I remember from a young girl going to watch my dad jump from C-130’s at Fort Bragg, NC. I remember when he would work late, we would take him a big mac, fries, and a shake from McDonald’s. I would hold his meal on my lap….and it smelled so good, but we couldn’t really afford to have us all eat at McDonald’s, so my mom would feed us at home earlier. My dad was stationed in different locations around the country every couple of years, so that really formed my personality. I can easily see it looking back today. I was so blessed to be exposed to so many different parts of the country and meet so many interesting people, some of whom I am still good friends with today.
My dad was a combat engineer with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. He was an airborne ranger and a master parachutist. He was a part of the jump team at Fort Bragg with the 82nd Airborne Division when I was growing up. He had a degree in finance and a masters in the same. He took several assignments during his later years doing just that….working on the budget for the Army at the Pentagon under big names like Schwarzkopf and Colin Powell. He was very proud of his lineage of a military man, and was very proud of his family members who also served. He commissioned Rich and me into the Air Force. He was very proud of his grandson, my Joe’s, service in the Army and that of his nephew, Emil. After nearly 30 years serving our country, it became such a part of who he was. It was the army bumper sticker on his truck or simply the veteran hat he always wore outside the house.
My dad’s attention to detail was notorious. I remember these stupid table lamps we had growing up with white pleated lampshades. When it was my turn to dust, he expected me to dust in between all those pleats. Many tears were shed over this. He used to laugh when I told him that is why I have no lamps in my home…and definitely no lamp shades. My dad also loved everything about the Civil War. We would go on vacation in the heat of the summer to walk fields with plaques in tall grasses. I did not appreciate those trips as a kid. It was not fun. But he enjoyed walking on that hallowed ground.
My dad has changed a lot over the years. He enjoyed being a grandpa. He had tea parties with his granddaughters and played cars on the floor with his grandsons. He mellowed out a bit. I really do miss him. He is still here in body, but his mind has been robbed by dementia over the last several years. He has been living in a memory care facility over the last 2 years. He no longer goes out and about because he has forgotten how to get into a car. He has days where he forgets how to use his spoon to eat. He can’t carry on a conversation and he doesn’t know his kids or his wife, although he seems to feel more comfortable with my mom, who comes to feed him twice a day. I talked with him over the phone today and told him I loved him. He said, “Thank you.”, which is the reply I have gotten over the last several months. I am heading to Houston next weekend to spend 5 days with my parents and try and bond with my dad as much as he is able. I never in a million years expected my dad to be where he is at this point in his life. I miss him terribly, and yet he is still here in body and even sometimes in spirit. Happy birthday, Dad. I love you (and you are welcome!). The fire truck is from 3 years ago when my brother was on duty and came for cake and ice cream on his engine with his crew to the house!
In early January, Rich and I flew to San Diego to do some training. We boarded the Holland America Line ship the Koningsdam. We proceeded to travel around the Baja peninsula of Mexico. We had never been on Holland America Line before….and absolutely loved it! By far our favorite cruise line. We have been on those mega ships….not our cup of tea now that we don’t have younger kids. We also weren’t a good fit for the river boat scene, where there was not much to do on the ships. We loved the versatility of being on a smaller ship, but still have lots to choose from in dining options and entertainment. We had never been to the west coast of Mexico, either, and it was a nice change from the touristy spots on the east coast. Not to say that Cabo isn’t touristy, it is. However, La Paz and Loreto were not – especially in January. How is this a work trip, you ask? Well, since Rich and I are travel advisors, we were on a new cruise line to us, a new area to us, and we actually had travel advisor classes on board. We had over 16 hours of training on the days at sea in the classroom, learning about marketing and sales. We had about 50 people in our class, so got to meet some really great folks. Lots of “where have you traveled?” and “How did you book a client who wanted this…” kind of conversations. During our three days in port, we were mostly doing water things. We took a glass bottom boat in Cabo San Lucas around the last pieces of land of the Baja peninsula called Land’s End, where “El Arco” or the Arch, a 200 foot granite rock formation sticks up out of the water. We went snorkeling with sea lions out in the Sea of Cortez. That was pretty crazy. First of all, it was not warm. Second of all, we were out in the open water swimming with sea lions. It was crazy! We saw a lot of pelicans, blue-footed boobies (you’ll know when you see the photos below which ones they are), and colorful crabs. We also saw some whales, even though we were not on a whale watching tour. Think of dogs hanging around the grill at a barbecue…in our stops, we saw sealions begging at the side of fishing boats. We had a wonderful time. We came back to San Diego a week later and got to catch an away game with Tim’s girl’s basketball team. We also got to spend a day with Tim at the San Diego Zoo. (in my defense, they recently got panda bears and I wanted to see them!) That will be a separate post. Here are some photos from our trip to the Baja peninsula of Mexico!
Well, it may be barely into the new year, but I am just getting to post our family photos from Christmas. We normally take photos over Thanksgiving, but we were not all together at that time. So we took photos the day after Christmas. Here are a few good photos and a few outtakes.
Wishing you all a warm and wonderful holiday season from Montana! We are enjoying living here so much! When we say, “just give us a call and come to visit”, we truly mean it. We weren’t together for Thanksgiving this year, so you’ll have to look on my blog for family photos to be taken when the kids are home over Christmas. My blog is : Messinamusings.com. It is a good place to keep up with our family and travels! Rich sold his Play It Again Sports business to his longtime manager early this year. We now have a new business and passion, Crown Jewel Cruise Planners. If you want to plan a trip somewhere, whether it be a cruise, land tour, group travel, or a special event, give us a call. Rich joined the Whitefish Biz to Biz group and the Columbia Falls Chamber of Commerce to network and has met a lot of great businessmen and women in the Flathead Valley. He is still playing both hockey and poker a couple of times a week and plans on joining a hockey team in January. Rich has taken advantage of being 30 minutes from the ski slopes and already been skiing a few times. He loves being able to look out the window in the morning at the mountains and decide if he’ll pack up his gear and go snowboarding. Rich is still working as a volunteer firefighter in our rural fire district and will be attending the local fire academy in May of 2025. Our Joe would have been 30 years old in November. We miss him like crazy, but being volunteer firefighters allows us to feel close to him when we are on calls. Joe makes sure hard days like birthdays, anniversaries, or holidays filled with calls, so we are with him, and he is with us. We attended his best friend’s wedding this fall to celebrate with them on his behalf. This summer we placed a park bench in Joe’s name in the town near us overlooking the fishing pond. We know Joe would love that spot. Michelle has moved to a new place closer to her work. It is a lovely home that seems to be the perfect place for her and the dogs. She remains active in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and even competed in her first meet this summer. We have seen her several times this year and are so happy Lily lives close so we can see both of our girls. We are so proud of Michelle – for the work she does and the woman she is – beautiful inside and out. Tim is 28 and in his second year at the University of California San Diego, where he is the head sports performance coach for their women’s basketball team. We went to watch him work and his team play in Colorado just before Thanksgiving. It’s fun to watch him do the job he loves. Tim has been out to Montana a few times and seems to enjoy our new home and the area where we live. We enjoy seeing him on ESPN+ when his team plays. Tim is enjoying living in San Diego and we plan to see him in January when we are there for our travel advisor business. He played in a 3-on-3 basketball league with some friends this fall and his team came in 2nd. Tim is always looking to advance, so he may be living somewhere else in my next Christmas letter. We shall see! We are so proud of him and the work he does for his college athletes! Lily is in her sophomore year at the Kansas City Art Institute and really flourishing there. She is majoring in illustration and minoring in entrepreneurship. Lily and her best friend from high school live in a duplex together and seem to be enjoying life on their own. It is always fun to visit them to see how they have decorated their place. Lily continues to make elaborate costumes for the anime conventions she and her friends go to a couple of times a year. Her creativity knows no bounds! While home in Montana for the summer, she worked at a local plant nursery in production. It seemed to be a good fit for her. She is hoping they will have a spot for her this coming summer. Lily gets a pretty long break over the holidays, so we are going to enjoy blaring the Wicked Soundtrack and baking together. She’ll get to go skiing with her dad a couple of times as well. Lily is growing into such a wonderful young woman. We can’t believe she’ll be 20 the week after Christmas! We are very proud of her! As for me, I have been busy! I love living in rural NW Montana where Carhart anything, work boots, and plaid flannel reign supreme for everyday wear. I have found my people! This year I decided to use my nursing background at the fire department, and in early 2024 got my EMR. I realized I found my calling, so I went right into EMT training. I am currently the Quick Response Unit Coordinator, in charge of the medical folks at our rural volunteer fire department. It’s a big job, but I enjoy the great group I work with. I have rekindled my love for learning and gone to a lot of EMS seminars and trainings. One of my favorites was the Crisis Intervention Team Academy with the Flathead County Sheriff’s department. I am also lecturing at our Catholic Church and volunteering there when I can. I belong to a group of nine grieving moms I have become close with via zoom and was happy to meet several of them in person this year, traveling to Canada. I also belong to a book club made up of local cancer patients/survivors. I look forward to those meetings! Although I still have stage IV cancer, I remain stable and active and thankfully have the ability to travel quite a bit. So travel….I travelled to 13 countries between May and October. Rich travelled to 11. We hadn’t planned to be gone so much this year, but the opportunities kept popping up and we took them! Our biggest trip was 5 weeks long. The first half was spent on a safari in Tanzania and Kenya. (So cool!) Trip of a lifetime doesn’t even cover it! I took over 4000 photos on that trip. (again, see my blog for photos!) We are already looking to go back and visit other African countries in May/June ’26. We are going to get a group together for this trip, so let us know if you want to come! The 2nd half of that 5 week trip was a European river cruise. Rich fell in love with Vienna, and I fell in love with Budapest, so we’d like to go back and visit the lower Danube someday. We went back to Europe a few weeks later with Rich’s siblings, going on a central Med cruise and then touring Sicily for 6 days. It was crazy seeing the name Messina on signs all around us! Although we spent a lot of time out of the country this year, we also travelled in the U.S. to Missouri, Florida, South Carolina, Nebraska, Colorado, and Texas. We were able to spend time with both sets of parents this year more than once, which we were happy about. We will be announcing group trips for 2025 and 2026 soon, so if you want to travel with us, keep in touch. We’d love to have you come with us to Africa, South America, to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro with Rich, or cruise with us in Europe. Come travel with us! As we continue our journey through the Advent season to Christmas, we pray you and your families are well and enjoying a beautiful season. We have so much to be thankful for in our lives despite some pretty rough going the last several years. We truly do want you to come and visit! We would love to show you around Glacier National Park and pamper you in our home. Just give us a call or send us a text and we’ll put you on our calendar! Let us remember all of those who have gone before us who will be greatly missed this season. Let us also keep our military, law enforcement, firefighters, and first responders in our daily prayers. Sending you all loads of love and warm wishes!
We were so very fortunate to have both Lily and Tim home for Christmas in Montana. Tim had a short turnaround time because his team is in season right now. He unfortunately got to Denver and had to spend the night there last night before picking up a different flight today back to San Diego. That was really the only hiccup with his visit other than we didn’t have any snow until the day he left. That did not stop us from cooking good food and snacks…and playing lots of games. Tim is our puzzle kid….always has been. He decided we needed a challenge and therefore ordered the puzzle and had it sent to the house ahead of him. It was NOT EASY! I have a photo of it here:
We worked on the puzzle everyday Tim was here, but we also played a lot of board and card games as well. I think our average bedtime was somewhere between 1 and 2 a.m. each night. Lily was crushing all of us in dirty rummy every night. This did not make her big brother very happy.
Lily arrived on December 15th and will be staying until January 25th – so a nice, long break. We have enjoyed cooking together while jamming to the Wicked Soundtrack. We also took a drive to a nearby pottery place called Montana Earth Pottery. We each walked away with a beautiful mug and I got a couple of big bowls that I have already used at our holiday open house the weekend before Christmas. The owner, Judy, was so nice. I felt like we were being welcomed into a friend’s home. I will definitely be back!
We were pretty busy over the holidays at the fire department. I finally told Joe that 5 calls in 24 hours over Christmas Eve and Christmas Day was getting a bit too much and to knock it off for a bit. We like to think that Joe is trying to get our attention when we are on calls and letting us know in his way that he is with us. He was with us a lot while Tim was in town. Luckily Tim and Lily were old enough to press “pause” on opening Christmas gifts so we could go on a medical call. Here are some photos of Tim and Lily….
You’ll have to wait until I process my good camera for family photos with the four of us. Maybe in a couple of days.
We have had a few Christmas cards trickling in this year. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention a couple of special gifts we received from friends related to remembering our Joe. I have a friend from our time in Norway, who is not religious at all, visiting Europe. She lit a candle for our Joe in one of churches she was in and sent me a picture. It meant so very much. Then I had another friend from our time in Bellevue, Nebraska, who had a beautiful candle made with our Joe’s photo on it. It is currently on my desk and I look at it every day. Then our dear friends from our time at Grand Forks AFB, North Dakota years and years ago…okay DECADES ago, sent us a postcard telling us that a wreath was laid on a veteran’s grave in memory of our SSG Joseph Messina. We are not only honoring Joe, but also honoring the gravesite of another fallen soldier. I can’t think of anything more fitting. We are so blessed to have people who still remember that Christmas may not exactly be “Merry” for us. There are a lot of memories…really good ones associated with Christmas. Knowing that we have future memories with Tim and Lily bring us hope. Knowing all our Christmas memories with Joe are in the past, is heartbreaking. So many of our friends are now having grandchildren and that is something that was also taken from us when Joe died. We are so very happy for them and their new roles as grandparents, but there is always that twinge of envy there. I think I would have loved being a grandma. I also would have loved Rich as a grandpa. I had a dentist appointment today and even though it was just a cleaning, the dentist did all the work. He mentioned to me that he had lost his dad this year, and what a good dad he was. He knows I have stage IV cancer and I told him about our Joe leaving before me…that my diagnosis allows me the freedom to tell people how I feel about them, even though that is not how I was raised. I told him that having this diagnosis was actually a big blessing, especially since we lost our Joe. I took out my letter I wrote to him for when I die and I realized I had said everything I wanted to him. That was a huge blessing. I told my dentist that I wished everyone could heed that advice. I found a poem today in my facebook feed that I wanted to share:
We have the tree up and the house decorated. There is snow on the ground and we even have outside lights up this year. That is a first as I don’t think we put lights up at all when we lived in Omaha. The Christmas cards are in the mail and the packages of gifts to family are also on their way. I had an hour to take a breath before the next project and decided to take some photos of my sidekick, Tallinn. He loves to wear his green satin bowtie (no, seriously, he loves it) and be the object of some Christmas photos. Enjoy!
We have been volunteering with Bad Rock Volunteer Fire Department and QRU for well over a year now. We have made some really good friends, and we have served our rural community by their sides. We started this whole thing wanting to honor our Joe, which we do every time we go on a call or help our fire hall in some way. I thought we’d be washing trucks and making cookies. Well, we certainly do that, but we didn’t realize that they would want us to join their ranks. I have been so blessed they did. I wanted to share a few photos taken of Rich and me recently.
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Messina Musings 