I've been thinking about the loved ones I've lost for a while now. Getting a card and album together is fun but it's also a distraction at a down time of year. I do it because I need to have the challenge and do something with a computer and stereo gear that I've always loved to do, when the internet was a fun place and showing my skills to create nice things made people happier, and me too.
This year I have all of my grandparents, my father, an uncle on each side, an aunt and a much-beloved girlfriend who died of breast cancer almost 19 years ago (on Christmas Eve) to remember and visit and I'm trying to work with Mom on this as they are buried/inurned over a 70 mile radius.
I was proud to hear my Uncle Weldon (Bud) is also at the Boise VA Cemetery as he served in Vietnam and it caused a lot of personal pain that he worked hard to overcome before leukemia (likely some aftereffect of Agent Orange?) took him at the young age of 64 (his mother died at 94, six months earlier). Dad had lung cancer that was magnified by being a mechanic and a Navy and Army National Guardsman from about 1960 to 1965. He was at Guantanamo during the Missile Crisis. My Uncle Rick wasn't as lucky in his dealings with alcohol as Bud and he went to prison for embezzlement, where he got sick and died, leaving my Aunt Ginger to recover from her codependency with my Grandma, where she had a brain hemorrhage and passed. My maternal grandpa died in the late 70s, leaving grandma until she joined him again a year and a half back, and dad's mother lost TWO husbands...the first has a number of heart attacks in the late 1950s and received one of the first artificial heart valve operations in Portland, Oregon in 1960 and his first pacemaker in 1969. Mom's grandfather died of old age but had to endure the loss of mobility when they took his golf cart away and her grandmother was blind and legally insane, cared for by her daughter (my grandma) until she died.
There are so many tales to tell that came from my grandparents leaving the South and middle US during the Depression, they could fill a website so I won't relate them here. This is the time my loneliness really rears it's head. My mom is now out of the back brace and I haven't seen her in over four months and I want to have dinner with Dad's oldest sibling and my favorite aunt, Jeanette and her daughter (who's son has something similar to my autism-it runs throughout two generations of our family).
So I do this also to do something good for a lot of others, which in turn makes me happy.
I hoped you were just teasing and suppose you were. I've got a couple tears hanging on to my eyes from thinking about my kin and it's been a little somber and serious since grandma left us this summer. I haven't been to pay respects to some of my loved ones in 5 to 29 years in some cases. Grandma Dinius insisted on only her remaining two children and close friends or family to witness her burial, no services and Bud also requested no services. I've never been to see them. I've worried even more about when I will lose my momma since the back surgery.
It takes a lot sometimes.
I never got married like I had wanted to for years. Some days that hurts.
Steven