On bravery and grace…
Good morning, Netizens...
This has been a rough month around our household. Suzie's mother passed away which came as no surprise as her husband of 60-some years, Suzie's father, had passed away not long before. Isn't it poignant that, when married couples have been together for decades of their lives together, and one dies, quite often their life partner dies shortly thereafter? It is almost as if the surviving partner cannot continue living alone, with feelings of having been abandoned.
As if the fates were out to impress us with its unpredictable bent, a special friend, Matt Wood, recently died of what authorities are calling a heart attack, although his wife stated to me by phone last night that he also had double pneumonia at the time. As you already know, Marty Hibbs died earlier this month, which just about rounded out my month of mourning.
Matthew was a special friend to not only myself but many others. I first met Matthew at his family's former pizza parlor years ago, and he and I shared an interest and avocation in Linux, and often gossiped about various facets of this open source operating system. As sometimes has been the case, we did not always see eye-to-eye; one afternoon, while standing in the middle of the street where he and his family once lived, we nearly came to bodily blows. Several days later, once our mutual egos had recovered somewhat, we sat on the front porch of his new house on the South Hill, and made amends for our mutually hot tempers, although we both continued to laugh about that incident in the middle of a street for years since.
Sitting here tonight, alone in the house with Suzie sitting in Chicago with her daughter both preparing for her mother's memorial with the pitter patter of the raindrops tiptoeing across the vent caps on the roof, it is peaceful beyond words. My cohort in journalistic crime, Jeanie of Spokane, just wrote a heart-wrenching story today about life http://www.spokesman.com/blogs/commcomm/2012/nov/27/my-grace/ and it warmed my heart so just to see her write with such acumen and grace.
Life is good, despite its occasional potholes.
Dave