Grandma Flo Van Gundersplat: Roller Derby Queen to 800lb Legend

• 👑 Harland Williams shares the story of his paternal grandmother, Flo Van Gundersplat, who was a roller derby athlete known as "Skinny Mini Miller" in her youth.
• 🤕 A severe leg injury from roller derby led Flo to cope through eating, eventually leading to morbid obesity and a weight of nearly 800 lbs.
• 🍗 She developed an extreme obsession with KFC, to the point of keeping buckets on her head to sniff the aroma.
• 🏗️ Due to her immobility, Flo had to be extracted from her second-story home via a crane through a hole in the roof.
• 🚑 After amputation of her legs due to gangrene, her dying wish was to be buried with roller skates on.
• ⚽ In a bizarre turn of events, her coffin fell during the funeral procession, and her legs rolled onto a soccer field, scoring the winning goal.
• 🍔 Her body then rolled downhill, stopping at a Burger King drive-thru where she grabbed a Whopper with cheese.
• 🦋 The story concludes with her body rolling to a stop on a boy pressing butterflies, perfectly flattening one.

Grandma Velma's White Christmas Miracle

• ❄️ Harland's maternal grandmother, Velma, lived in Glendale, California, and loved the idea of a white Christmas.
• 👵 Despite suffering from severe arthritis and psoriasis, Velma invited neighborhood children over for Christmas Eve.
• 🎶 She sang Christmas carols while standing on an IKEA chair, and as she disrobed, she scraped her psoriasis scabs, which the children perceived as snow.
• 🎁 This unique experience provided the children, who had never seen snow, with a memorable "white Christmas."
• 💔 Velma passed away at 86 from natural causes, but her arthritic hands remained tightly curled, causing an injury to Harland's sister.

Lessons on Mortality and Compassion

• 💔 Harland recounts his first experience with death at 14, seeing his grandfather, Neil O'Donnell, laid out in an open casket, which deeply impacted his understanding of mortality.
• 😥 He also shares his daughter's distress at receiving multiple sympathy cards around Christmas, highlighting the difficulty of repeated reminders of loss.
• 🤝 A significant lesson from Grandma Velma was about compassion, as she never revealed that Harland had stolen money from her purse, teaching him the value of private lessons and intuitive understanding.
• 🚑 Harland also describes performing CPR on his grandmother after she collapsed, a traumatic experience that underscored the fragility of life.
• 🌊 In a darkly humorous anecdote, Harland recounts saving one woman from choking at a cliffside restaurant, only for the dislodged shrimp to hit another woman, causing her to fall 200 feet to her death, illustrating the podcast's theme of balance.