My mom made me this little cross necklace that I’ve been wearing to shows and on the road recently. I’ve just found it really comforting, you know, having a little piece of her with me. It’s weird, because like, I’m not even that religious anymore—like, I don’t even really think about God at all that much—but ever since I’ve been wearing the cross, people have been writing articles about how I’m finding Jesus again, and it’s like: No, I just love my mom’s jewelry. But whatever, you know, there are worse things people could be saying about me.

Weirdly, the funeral service was uber-religious, which was crazy because, like, out of the three of us, my dad was the one who NEVER gave a shit about religion—like, the only reason he even wanted us to keep going to church was so that I could practice my singing—but the priest at the funeral read a TON of Bible verses. We were standing out there for what had to have been an hour, just going through all this scripture. And I don’t know, maybe it was just because my dad knew the speeches were gonna be short, and so he wanted to stretch the run time of the funeral for as long as he could just so that the press could get all the coverage they needed, but a part of me thinks that he really was a little more religious than he let on, or like, maybe God started to mean a lot to him in his final days. I don’t know. It was nice to hear some of those verses again, and like, sing some of those songs. A lot of that stuff had sort of dropped out of my life, so to be reminded of it all at a moment like that was actually kind of powerful.

The choir director from St. James was there, by the way. I guess I forgot to mention that. He flew all the way out from Minnesota, and I let him crash in my guesthouse for a few days. He was really heartbroken by the whole thing—I mean, everyone back in St. James was—because, you know, we were sort of an important family to all those people. Even if we hadn’t visited in like, forever, and even if we had lost touch with most of them for a couple years, my dad’s death still hit the community pretty hard, because, you know, aside from me, the most notable person to ever come out of St. James was this guy Mike Kingery who played for the Seattle Mariners, and, like, he wasn’t even that amazing at baseball, you know? He was just on the team. So people felt really invested in my family. I don’t think anybody even knew my dad was back in town until he blew his brains out. At the burial, the choir director was bawling his eyes out, which was kind of a mess, since he was supposed to be leading everybody in the songs. He’d like, get through half a verse and then sob for a bit, and then we’d all have to stand there waiting for him to get his shit together so we could make it to the chorus.