12 Years ago, it was a morning just as it was today, except that I was married to a young Black woman who was used to telling me everything that was wrong with my family, something that I look back today and laughed about as her rantings about my family only seemed to occur when she realized how financially destitute we were despite just having been hired by an ISP and we had free Internet, Phone and Television, which she enjoyed thoroughly while I was hard at work at night. She ordered delivery from the local pizza place and I found the scraps leftover in the fridge when I got home. It was not a marriage of convenience, nor a marriage of great expectations…
WE had planned on going for a drive that morning, I don’t remember where, but we were driving in the Jeep Liberty, I think, when I got the call on my cell phone from my Uncle Craig. He told me “Hey, Buddy, I just wanted to call and let you know that your Mom went into the hospital this morning. She lost control of her kidney functions and well, she went pretty quickly without pain. I’m sorry.” I started crying and pulled over in the Walgreens before I began to cry.
For everything that followed after that, the death of my father, Herb, and the divorce from my Ex, the several relationships that followed afterwards, nothing seemed to hurt so much as that moment. It felt as if Craig had betrayed me and Bethany. It felt as if the entire family had let us down, and his horribly callous bedside manner left a knife in me. Bethany and I talked about Dad coming back to Buffalo, but Craig advised against it, after all, Grandma Rose was getting older and was going to be 100 years old soon, if she lived that long, and her son was also accelerating in age. So, Craig said that Dad refused to visit and Herb would visit us again via the AMtrak before his death.
What followed each other their deaths was a period of anger, resentment, rage, denial, and sadness that I can only describe as trying to let go of the anchor that kept your boat moored to the pier.
The Topic Cafe 