And Then Real Life Crashes In

My wife's father died yesterday morning. He'd been in the hospital for about three weeks, on life support, after suffering a couple of serious heart attacks. The prognosis was grim from the start, though he hung on, unconscious and heavily medicated, for longer than anyone expected.

Though it's a long, involved, odd story, basically my wife and her father didn't really have much of a relationship; he removed himself from the lives of her, her siblings and their mother when she was young, and they had only had minimal contact since. He was a troubled man, who had had a serious drinking problem, though when my wife tracked him down several years ago, she was happy to learn that he had embraced AA and the local church and had been sober for 26 years.

There's a lot of other stuff too, that's too private to go into in a public forum like this. Suffice it to say that in a perfect world, he would have been a stronger man, but he wasn't, and my wife has made her peace with this.

I'm a lucky man. Until this week, I've never had to be even partially responsible for having to worry about what to do with someone who died, and after going through the process of helping with the funeral home/cemetery arrangements, I'm rather horrified by it all. Losing a family member is stressful enough; having to deal with everything that comes along with the aftermath adds another layer of stress.

I had no idea how much it costs to bury someone, even without many real bells or whistles. I know now.

But my wife is coming through this all very strongly, while it has formed new bonds between us and her father's family (his sisters and their grown children). So even in death, new things emerge.

But my writing is off on a shelf again. There's family stuff to deal with, and work piling up (not that I'm complaining) that needs to be done, and priorities that are being reshuffled. The volume of time that just last week hung on me like an albatross has now been entirely sucked away.

But it won't be long before I dust it off, and dive back in again. I've promised myself.

Until then, call your parents, and hug your kids.