Thank you for sharing your homage to your son. A handsome young man with a vibrant and obvious expression of a thirst for experience and joy for life shines throughout your homage. It is a tribute to the family that fostered a loving, complete and cohesive environment to thrive within.
If you don't mind answering this but I am interested in knowing if Vincent participated in or made any requests for how this Homage was made?
Vincent's life experiences couldn't have been designed any better for facing the reality of his too short a life as it was shown in photos of the extreme sports, facing down death in pursuit of living large. It is no easy task to overcome the very real fear of great heights in technical rock climbing where falling to your death is a genuine possibility. His choices for the joy of experience and learning reverberate with the tangible and intangible assets and qualities that gave him courage to live and why he was so dear to his family. He learned the piano and undoubtedly used music to calm him and provide an outlet to express his deepest feelings.
The homage to Vincent affected me deeply. The choices of music and photographs from every age and stage of his life reminds us that he was much more than a 28 year old man. We forget that this full life was mostly accomplished with the blood, sweat and tears of a loving family.
I have found comfort in those times when I grieve in the writings of John Dunne. Vincent's passing diminishes us all. "Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee... No man is an island, unto itself aloof from the world..."
I can grasp some sense of the depth of your grief. I'm a second generation CFer and though my father lived an additional twenty years more than Vincent, my sister was 13, me 20 and my mother was 36 when he died. It was a wild mix of emotions. We were grateful his struggle was over angry with the world for letting him slip away but the unbearable pain was listening to my mother reeling with grief as she cried herself to sleep every night for almost a year. No child should precede their parents.
Vincent is at peace, it's time to find your own peace.
Please accept my deepest sympathy for Vincent and his loving, grieving family,
LL