January 6th, 2014

People who hear me talk about the events of the last months hear that on December 19th (2013) my eldest sister died, and for whatever reason, my younger sister decided that this was a good time to launch a series of personal attacks on the family. The day after Kathie died, my wife Pam's mother fell and injured herself severely, requiring an emergency knee replacement that was far more serious than a regular replacement because of the multiple breaks in the femur. While she seemed to come through the surgery well, that night she had a major brain bleed that paralyzed half of her body and made her incapable of speech. On December 30, she passed away. While preparing for her funeral, Pam learned that a cousin of hers that she was very close to growing up, had died on December 29th. We went through the second funeral in two weeks, and spent the weekend just grieving and trying to recover from all the shock. When we returned to work on January 6th, Pam learned that her co-supervisor's husband had died on January 4th from a severe stomach problem. We can't seem to recover before something else happens.

Believe it not, there is some comfort in the fact the the reason all of this is so overwhelming is because we don 't usually suffer so much loss, and definitely not so much at any one time. Everyone has their time to die, and we just had several whose time came up at once.