57 thoughts on “Our Daily Thread 11-19-18”

  1. Looks like a nice place to live.
    Until the water starts rising. But it may go over the dam first.
    Good morning everyone but Jo.
    Every week has to have a Monday.
    Good night Jo. Your Monday is over.

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  2. Every day when I sign on, I go back to catch up on yesterday’s Daily Thread. That’s the only one I check. Looks like I got into f fight between Mumsee and Cheryl.
    OK ladies. Rotten eggs at 20 paces.
    😆

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  6. Morning! That is a lovely spot up there. Is it Fall anywhere in this country?
    Our ice is melting but you must be careful because looks can be deceiving…that black ice will get ya every time!
    My day just got a lot busier….I planned to make a pie and sides for our Thanksgiving meal for Wednesday but received a late note yesterday from daughter who lives in the Springs saying they want to come here for Thanksgiving….we were told they were going to spend the day with HIS side of the family once again. Plans now change and I need to go out an buy a ham and more fixins’….it’ll be fine and we love seeing them….there is a lesson in all of this…hope I learn well from Him….

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  8. Thanksgiving. We had it spur of the moment last week when daughter and family came up to give us the dogs. It was very relaxing because it was last minute, no time to get in a dither.

    However, a couple in church has opened their home for guests so I decided, with Mike gone trucking, I and three children will go to their house. It will be an opportunity for the children to practice eating with others and experience a bit more and I will enjoy it. And the hosts like having folks over so maybe I can get to know them a bit as well.

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  9. Today though, it is off to a doc appt for seventeen year old daughter to see if we can find out why things are not physically working normally for her. Wisdom for the doctor, of course.

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  10. I don’t know where “there” is in the photo, but I would love to sit outside and drink my coffee.
    Instead, I have already called the carpet cleaners. Poor Lulabelle was sick from EARLY yesterday morning through last night. They can’t come until Wednesday afternoon. I will have to drag the area rug outside and clean it myself with some Woolite carpet cleaner. I am not paying by the square foot to have it cleaned.

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  11. I have the sweetest/saddest story to share with you. You all know that my friend L died in February after a long battle with cancer. There was a little drama over the weekend with her widower husband, R and the CRAZY New Girlfriend.
    R has their house for sale and has moved to the “cottage”. Last week on L’s birthday the pipes burst at the main house and flooded the downstairs. While I know it isn’t real, I had to laugh that L wasn’t happy.
    I called L’s mother yesterday to check on her and give her a laugh that the pipes burst on her daughter’s birthday. We started talking about all sorts of things. The backstory you have to know is that the last two months of my Senior year of high school I lived with L’s family so her mother is like another mother in my life.
    She started talking about L’s last day in the hospital and that her daughter told her she was scared. She told her she promised not to let her be in pain. I told her about going to the hospital and L telling me it was bad. THEN, she told me that R wouldn’t be in the room as L was dying. She held her while she died. I sobbed. No mother ever wants to hold her child while she dies, but the picture that put in my mind—Jan held her as a newborn and comforted her and she held and comforted her as she left this world. What a picture of a mother’s love.

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  12. The Boise saga, for those who missed it and care:

    Several years ago, when husband had his knee replacement surgeries, I commented that in ten or so years, I might be amenable to moving to Boise, so husband could enjoy city life again. He said he loved where we live.
    Then daughter was asking when we would move to Boise (similar to when I ask her when she is moving to Nezperce) and I said, when the house next door comes available. I have no affinity for the house next door, never really looked at it, but the “next door” idea was appealing for when we get old.

    She, about a week later, said, the house across the street is available. We worked on the finances of such a move and nobody was making any offers on it. Mike looked at it and put in a bid through a realtor. We learned that after our bid was put in, somebody put in a lower bid, and it was accepted. We said, God does not want us in Boise at this time.

    Several times daughter said, the house down the way, or across the street, or whatever was available. I said, we are waiting for the house next door.

    Then she said the house next door is coming available. The renters have been told to move out and the owner is coming back from Norway to deal with it. We asked her to get the contact info for the owner. Mike began emailing her and told her we were interested if she made no improvements and did not call in a realtor as that would save us fifteen thousand plus. She said she was quite willing to talk. Finally, we put in an offer that seemed reasonable to us and to our advisors. More than was easy to spend but about fifteen thousand less than what we had heard she was looking for. She said she had talked to a couple realtor friends who had advised she could get several thousand more than she was thinking. And that is quite likely as houses do not remain on the market long in Boise. But she still wanted to give us first option. Mike responded thanks, but no thanks, we had offered our maximum.

    We both breathed a sigh of relief and settled back into not moving to the city and enjoying growing ancient here or in the local town. The owner came back to say she wanted us to have it so she was accepting our offer. She knows we would plan to rent it out again until we are ready to move, probably when these children are grown. But it will be an option in case we decide we cannot do this anymore. Like if I decide I can’t climb on the roof anymore.

    Who knows, we may move there next year. Or maybe not for eight years I can see that we could be helpful to daughter’s family. They both work so both little people are in day care. Daughter always imagined being a stay at home mom but she is an RN and works three twelves a week. He has not been able to get a job in his field but does work. We will see.

    We also believe this is the best possible place to raise these children but they could learn city life as well. And so the saga continues.

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  15. Kim, how poignant. 😦

    Mumsee, sounds like a good plan especially if you can continue to stay where you are for a while longer.

    I have a couple annoying stories I have to do today/early this week that I’ve managed to ignore through the weekend. Everyone’s in a spin over (a) the final take-down of the beloved 50+plus year-old waterfront restaurant building, vacant since June; and (b) the immediate clearing out of the large mentally ill facility not far away from that due to a city order for owners to leave due to broken, unfixable elevator.

    As I said, everyone’s in a heatwave over both issues, spreading rumors on social media as fast as you can try to keep up with them. A couple people have nagged me about “why aren’t you COVERING THIS!?” Because it’s the weekend. Monday will come soon enough, I’ll deal with it then.

    Well, it’s Monday. (Both stories have been covered already, of course, just not the latest micro-events and fleshing out of the rumors that are exploding over the past 48 hours.)

    I hate rumors. When you ask how people “know” something is fact, it’s usually because, well, Larry down the street told them so!

    I’d rather be holding ladders with Cheryl today.

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  16. Same here, crying over that lovely, sad story.

    Kim – Was it R’s choice not to be in the room while L died? It seems that his having a girlfriend so soon is a sign of denying his grief. It will backfire on him, and maybe on his girlfriend, too, one day.

    Just this morning, I was missing Hubby and crying, and wondering how it could still be so painful after a little over a year. I can’t imagine being in a relationship with someone else at this point. (Quite frankly, I can’t realistically imagine ever dating again, let alone remarrying.)

    (I say “realistically imagining” because I can imagine it, but not in a way that seems actually realistic or likely to happen.)

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  17. Kizzie, it is not unusual for the closest to stay out of the room. I don’t remember if my dad was in the room with my mom, but I know he was there with her every moment of her six year battle with cancer. He had done most of his mourning before she died. He did not remarry for a couple of years but he definitely had mourned my mom.

    My father in law did not stay in the room with my mother in law until the very end. He left her final care of two weeks to us. But he also had done his mourning and had cared for her in her dementia and in her cancer. People often make choices that are fine for both of them that others may see as strange.

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  18. I have a friend who suffered pretty much the greatest imaginable tragedy when she ran over and killed her own child. The family had a new baby, the mother’s sister was in town for a visit, and they were going to get a family portrait, complete with the new baby. The two-year-old was in the house with her father, her aunt, and her older siblings, and the mother backed the van out of the garage . . . but the two-year-old had gotten out of the house with nobody knowing. Police who came to the scene said no one did anything wrong, it is simply one of those horrific accidents.

    Both parents not only went to college with me, but each worked with me on yearbook (different years) before they were married, she lived on my floor (but not on my wing), and the year that my sister also attended my college she roomed with this lady (at my suggestion that they would like each other). I was in their wedding. (She’s also the friend who suggested the online dating service through which I met my husband.) When I got the e-mail mentioning “tragedy” but not saying what had happened and linking to the news article about it, I wailed. It was just a few days before Easter. The Christmas card that year or the next included the family photo they eventually did take . . . complete with a pair of empty shoes. They ended up having one more child, but then the mother said No more. She simply couldn’t handle it when those last two babies reached the age at which their sister had died so horribly. The mother and the daughter who had been an infant when the toddler died came to our wedding and sat with my sister and family at the reception. She hadn’t seen my sister since either of them was married (I had seen her a couple of times) and they had a lot of catching up to do.

    One way she dealt with her grief during that time was to write poetry. She wrote of sitting in the driveway, holding onto her bleeding baby and waiting for the ambulance, pleading with God to let her live even if it meant that she was badly disabled, and she wrote, “I birthed you, and now I have deathed you.” I never met the child who died, though I have seen all their other children but the youngest. But that line from her poem sometimes haunts me, and I know the grief for that mother will never be totally gone until the end, when God wipes away all tears from our eyes and that baby runs whole and new into her mother’s arms once again, at whatever ages we are in eternity. The sorrows of this life will be nothing to the joys then–but the sorrows here are often real and deep.

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  19. Today would have been my parents’ 58th wedding anniversary. (They made it to 44 years before Dad died.) My 58th birthday is in January. There used to be a saying that the first baby can come at any time; after that it takes nine months.

    I was premature, but only by close to a couple months, not seven months. 😀

    Interestingly, I did not have to stay in the hospital any longer than a full-term newborn, at least not much longer if I am mistaken about that. My telling that to someone one time caused them to wonder aloud if maybe my dad wasn’t my biological father. Maybe I was full-term, but Mom had told Dad I was his, and lied about me being early.

    But there is too much of a resemblance to my dad in me to believe that. I think I’ve written before that Nightingale has my dad’s nose profile. That makes me think that if I did not have this “Moebius nose”, as I call it (many of us with Moebius have similar noses), my nose would have been similar to Nightingale’s.

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  20. Mumsee – I can understand that. I was just wondering if it was his choice, or if L didn’t want him there, to protect him.

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  23. Kizzie– I’ve heard men and women process death differently and for many men who had a happy marriage–and therefore knew the joys of a good marriage–they start looking for a wife and often are remarried within a year.

    It’s hard for everyone else in the family, but that’s how they deal with the grief–particularly if the first wife has been dying for a long time. A lot of the mourning was done then.

    Kim’s friend, like men I’ve known, is also a “catch” for women in the later years of life.

    My father destroyed a bunch of family relationships and made grief and mourning so much harder for many of us, when he had a girlfriend–the widow across the hall–within a few months of my mother’s shocking and unexpected death.

    He also was so emotionally clueless–and in denial about his own grief–that he took her to visit all his friends and relatives. He undoubtedly thought they would be happy for him that he’d found someone to “take my mother’s place.”

    Unfortunately for him, all his friends and relatives were my mother’s first and that caused a lot of shock and hurt. He never realized the girlfriend actually looked and acted a lot like my mother, but I saw it immediately.

    In our grief, we didn’t handle this truly lovely woman very well. We were reeling from my mom’s death and now my father’s really bizarre behavior. It made a very hurting time that he inadvertently made much more hurtful.

    When she finally had enough of the hostility and my father, we got to deal with his crazy yet not-acknowledged–grief all over again, this time complicated by strokes.

    Those seven years until he died were probably the hardest of my life. It was that question of how to balance honoring a father whose behavior was anything but honorable. 😦

    Though he meant well.

    I don’t know what the answer is–a man can’t really hide a new relationship from his wife’s family and friends but some discretion could help.

    L probably told him to find a wife again, gave him her blessing to do so or perhaps ordered him–but that doesn’t make it easier on family members who are still dealing with their grief.

    😦

    Not quite crying again. Let’s pray for that family.

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  24. The Lord is good. I need to write two blog posts today and run a gazillion errands. I have been casting around trying to think of what and how to write a post on gratitude.

    Today, I discovered I’d missed a post that ran last week, which I wrote months ago, that fits my plan perfectly. I’m just going to reference it and I’m done with mine!

    Here it is, Lessons on Gratitude Learned from a Natural Disaster. FYI:

    https://www.allmomdoes.com/2018/11/14/lessons-on-gratitude-learned-from-a-natural-disaster/

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  25. I find it sadly amusing that they have to rename schools because the person they named the school for turns out to be a bad guy. Take Ben Carson school for example. He is such a bad guy. What did he do? A black guy, raised by a single mom, married forty three years to the same woman, successful brain surgeon, presidential candidate, director of HUD. Well no wonder Detroit doesn’t want him! And Frederick Douglass…..

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  26. Kizzie, it is very, very common for widowers to be dating again within weeks and to marry within a year or a year and a half.

    My mom’s second husband had been married almost 50 years to his first wife. My mom had been friends with them for most of that time (she knew them before she knew Dad, because their church sent Mom to the mission field and she kept in touch with this couple), and she was planning a trip to visit them that fall when she got news that the wife had died. Well, they lived fairly close to one of my brothers, less than an hour away, so she would visit them and this brother. The husband encouraged her “Come anyway,” and I don’t know if she knew till she got there that he had designs on her. He put his arm around her during that visit, and she was freaked out–his wife had only been dead two or three months, I think, maybe not even that long. For a while Mom went back and forth between two boyfriends, one in Phoenix and the one in Georgia. Each knew about the other, each wanted to marry her, and she couldn’t make up her mind. (How many women over 70 have that dilemma?!) The friend in Georgia was coming to visit her once, and she asked if he wanted to meet the other friend while he was there, and he, rather astounded, asked, “Do you really think that’s a good idea?” But she married the Georgia boyfriend, and ended up with a stepdaughter who was named for her (the woman’s first and middle names were for missionaries, and she ended up going by her middle name, which was Mom’s name).

    My brother expressed interest in one lady three to five months after he buried his wife. (He told her pastor he was interested, and asked him to ask her.) When she said no, she wasn’t interested, within a month he started dating someone else, and he married her less than 14 months after burying his first wife. But then, I know a man (or used to know him, anyway) who within five or six months of the death of his wife, he had let his father move into his house, and he had married and moved into his new wife’s house in a different city. I don’t think it is a good thing, but it doesn’t mean these men didn’t love their wives. It means they find themselves alone and they cannot handle it. If there are young children involved, it can be a good idea to get a new wife / mother for the children fairly quickly, and that would have been extremely common in the days that women more often died in childbirth. I myself often thought I might end up in such a situation, though instead I ended up with older stepchildren. But I was mentally prepared if a man with several young children would have come to me with a marriage proposal that was as much business as anything else, and when I got a more romantic version of the scenario I had envisioned, that definitely worked. (I wouldn’t have married a man if we weren’t on the same page on important things, but I would have married a man with whom the initial main interest was not romantic, but practical.)

    Both of my parents died alone, BTW. Dad died when Mom had just stepped out of the bedroom (and I was within a few yards myself), and Mom was living alone when she died. My father-in-law died in the hospital with a whole bunch of family in the hospital with him, but for various reasons none of us was in the room with him when he started to slip away. My husband thinks that he actually “chose” that time on some level so as not to distress his wife of 60+ years. But the nurse who saw his vitals nose-diving called his wife and daughter (I think his son-in-law was in the room already, but napping), and they called my husband and me and our older daughter, who were down the hall. My husband thinks he was still alive when we got in the room, but I don’t know. There was no obvious last breath or anything, and after a while we just knew he was gone. But my husband recited Scripture over him, and he held one of his hands and Mom held the other. I’d like to think that he was indeed still alive as his son recited words from Scripture sending him to be with Jesus, but really only God knows that. A couple of the grandchildren weren’t there, and we called them to come. The nurse poked her head in and asked if we wanted her to check his vitals, and we said no, wait till they have come. So he wasn’t officially declared dead till all his local children and grandchildren were present, but almost certainly he was actually dead before then.

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  27. A good, and I expect common situation occurred with my sister, et. al.
    Sister and husband were friends with a couple.
    Sister’s husband died. She remained friends with the couple.
    Wife of friends died.
    Sister and friend hooked up and live together. They didn’t marry because Navy widow’s annuity. At their age, I’m sure no sex in involved.
    They take care of each other. An ideal, is my figuring, situation.
    They travel all over the country together.

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  28. Kizzie, you asked me on the weekend R&R thread if I was Pentecostal. For most of my Christian life I’ve been a member of two Baptist churches. But I’ve also been a member of an evangelical Congregational church, the Open Bible church, and a Presbyterian church, and attended a large Foursquare church for a time too.

    I joined the Open Bible church in my last year of college simply because it was small. Before that I’d been in Pasadena’s large Lake Avenue Congregational Church. LACC is a fine church and the sermons and the college pastor’s talks helped lay a great foundation in my new Christian walk. But being an introvert, I too easily remained a wallflower and connected only with other college students, mostly from my own school. I decided I wanted to be in a smaller church where I’d have more opportunities to know people of all ages, and where I could contribute more. A friend who had just moved away recommended the Open Bible church to me.

    I did feel welcomed and appreciated there, and I liked the pastor very much. But most of the people were elderly and had been there since it was a lively growing place in the ’50s. As the people were dying, the church was dying too. There were two families with teenagers and a young seminary couple. And me. When the pastor left, I left too.

    I was like Goldilocks. I’d been in churches that were too big and too small, so I went looking for a church that would be “just right”.

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  29. When my brother married again so quickly, it was extremely hard on his only daughter (he also has sons). My sister and I talked about it, and said we knew our brother would marry quite quickly (and that it would not reflect lack of love for his first wife) and that had we been “thinking,” we should have given our niece a heads-up that it was likely.

    He really, really wasn’t ready to marry again, though. The cancer took four years to take her, but in most of that time both of them were convinced she would get better, even after she was declared stage 4 and told she had less than six months (she made it another year). He hadn’t processed the grief. He would often call his new girlfriend to cry about his wife’s death, and she felt honored he was that open with her. It was a long-distance relationship, and when she flew east to meet his family, right away he took her to his first wife’s grave, where the grass seed we had planted was just starting to grow. But four years later, when my sister lost her husband, he told her it doesn’t get easier over time, but harder. That sent alarm bells through both of us, and we felt really bad for his new wife. She was in effect living in a haunted house, sharing her husband with his late first wife. In addition, my brother’s daughter resented that he took a new wife into the house he built for her mother, and they ended up buying another house and trying to sell that one. (Eventually they rented the first one out instead.)

    That all helped me be really careful with my stepdaughters’ feelings. Though their mom had been dead about five years, I knew I was moving into their house and not just his. We had a few necessary changes to make (turning the family room into a library that included my office, and turning his all-purpose, family-focused room back into a master bedroom) and we had a few improvements we chose to make with the assets from the sale of my house (putting cabinets in the laundry room, better doors on the inner doors, etc.) . . . and he elected to take down the photos of his first wife, and I didn’t really care one way or the other, but I allowed him to take them down and give them to the girls . . . but I chose to keep the living room and kitchen decorated as they were, and the Christmas tree to use the same familiar ornaments, for four or five years, even the aspects I didn’t like (such as the pigs and cows in the kitchen and the female angel Christmas tree topper). But now, we’re empty nesters and we have our own house that is totally ours, with no concern about whether certain decorating choices will offend someone or other. And on moving day it turned out that our pregnant daughter didn’t come by (she’s one who doesn’t want to “say goodbye”; she didn’t come when we were going to put Misten down, either), but the other daughter ended up being the last person in the house with her dad, and they could hug each other while she cried. He and I had planned to leave together, and neither of us was all that happy that circumstances changed and we couldn’t. But it turned out to be good that our son-in-law had a co-pilot who knew where we were going as he drove that enormous truck, and I felt good that they had had that last daddy-and-daughter moment, too. She grew up in that house; I only lived in it for six-and-a-half years. Though it was precious to me, as the house in which I was a bride, leaving it was bigger for her than it was for me. Plus, we were leaving voluntarily, and she was seeing us go. For us the move was mostly good (except for leaving them a few hours away); for the girls it wasn’t at all good.

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  30. I told my husband just to find one of my widowed Navy wife friends and marry her–it would make everything easy. She’d know all about my kids and would be used to adjusting as per our lifestyle. She’s also be able to correctly identify submarines.

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  31. Good afternoon. Some very tragic stories y’all are sharing today. It is really horrible when parents outlive their children. I have only known of a few people who have dealt with that. There was a story on the Atlanta news this week about a single black mother who works two jobs and barely makes a living. Her eighteen-year-old daughter had an asthma attract which killed her. The girl was beautiful and seemed to be a lovely person. The mom had an urn with her daughter’s ashes in it that she kept with her in a backpack. The lady was staying with friends at an apartment and the friends were uncomfortable about having the urn and ashes in the house. The lady put the backpack outside by a tree. Unfortunately, the landscape people thought it was junk so it got tossed. The lady reported it in time to find out which dump truck picked it up and what pile it got put in at the garbage collection site. One of the workers got down into the pit to look for it and eventually found it! Glory be to God! It was such a touching story especially considering the generosity of the white man who used his time to get her reunited with her daughter’s remains.

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  32. Did Chas ever make clear who the 159# turkey is that he mentioned over the weekend? It must be Chuck. If I’m not mistaken he’s only 60, but his birthday is 8/17, so if you count “in utero” time he’s been cooking for 61 years right about now. (How do I remember Chuck’s birthday? It’s also my and Mrs. B’s anniversary. How do I remember his age? Chas and Elvera were married the year I was born. Chuck came along the next year IIRC.)

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  33. Oh, Janice, I’m so glad she got her daughter’s ashes back! God bless those who helped her. (Can you imagine how guilty her friends would feel if the urn couldn’t have been found?)

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  34. Cheryl – It is because of your brother’s story that I wonder if, although it is common for widowers to remarry quickly, many of them have similar experiences.

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  35. I spent most of the morning get a new set of tires for Art’s car. I ended up getting the Goodyear Comfortourtred (sp?) They have free installation this week along with some great rebates in case anyone is in the market for new tires.

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  36. I was at the tire store before they opened at 7 a.m., but the first store did not end up being helpful so I went on to plan B and called a store which is not as convenient, but which said they had what I wanted.

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  37. I can see how it would be different if dementia is involved or if the time of death is not predictable. But in Kim’s story it’s hard for me to imagine the husband not wanting to be there. I don’t mean to judge, I just can’t understand it. I’d want Mrs B holding my hand if it were me dying, and I’d want to be there for her.

    My mother was very ill and in the hospital and we knew her time was near, so my dad and siblings and I stayed close by. A nurse made sure we knew it was time so we could be in the room with her when she passed.

    We siblings knew Dad would never marry again. Actually we didn’t expect him to live long, but he survived, content to be alone, for 20 more years. I think I’m a lot like him in this respect. If I were to lose Mrs B I doubt that I’d remarry.

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  39. In my story, none of us like the new girlfriend. The timeline is questionable and she is an alcoholic. I tried to like her and did for a while. When she tried to drag me into her crazy, alcoholic drama is when I told R that I loved him but would not deal with the drama. I called her and told her the same thing. She started crying to me that no one liked her. I asked what she expected and told her to “suck it up, buttercup”.
    I still love R and want him to be happy. His happiness does not include me dealing with an alcoholic who threatens to kill herself because his friends don’t like her.
    Too much information?????

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  40. I broke down and had Real Estate Guy come put the thermostat in today while I ran off to a quick interview at the port (I’ve been working from home today). It took him an hour or less, he was just finishing up by the time i got home, I gave him $40, and I have heat in the house again.

    Earlier I’d called the hometown electrician I’d used for something — he’s older, semi-retired, and was very reasonable — but he said he didn’t “do” thermostats, that I’d have to find a heating/plumbing guy and he didn’t know any he could recommend. Sigh.

    Real Estate Guy said I’d never have been able to get this in myself which I already knew after watching the YouTube video and paging through the thick instruction booklet that seemed to be written in a foreign language (and yes, I was reading the English portion of it).

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  41. After my mom passed away, most of the widows and single older women in the church would not leave him alone. He had seen several men get married too soon, so although he was desperately lonely, he did not do anything for one full year. After the year had passed, he talks to God and said “if Frieda is in church this Sunday, I will know you want me to ask her out” (or an idea similar to that). Frieda lived 10 hours north of dad’s city. She was in church. They dated “secretly” (us kids knew, but nobody else) by going to a nearby town for their dates so they wouldn’t run into anyone who would start rumours. I think they married 6 months later, and I am so grateful for Frieda who is a gem.

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  42. My whole family knew my father-in-law was dying, it was just a question of when.

    My mother-in-law did little those last two or three days but hold her husband’s hand, and I thought later that she would probably look back on those days as priceless. His ability to communicate, or even let us know whether he was aware of us, was lessening, but he didn’t seem to be in any pain. He was simply fading away.

    Someone questioned whether I would want to be there, because I had never been in the room when someone died. (Most everyone else had been present when my husband’s first wife had died, so the girls had seen someone die.) I thought OK, no one ever “wants” to see someone die, but I’ve lost more people to death than anyone else in that room except my mother-in-law. I just happened not to have been in the room when they died! But I’d already lost both of my own parents, plus my stepfather, plus a sister-in-law and brother-in-law, all my aunts and uncles except one (though, granted, the one who is left is the one I actually know), and while I have never known a “real” grandparent, I’ve lost the one I adopted when I was a teenager after knowing her more than a quarter century. And I wasn’t going to hang out in the waiting room while my husband lost his father because death might be unpleasant!

    With my own father, other than my mother I’m the last one who saw him alive and the first one who saw him dead. I was washing dishes in the kitchen, heard him breathing heavily and looked in on him, then told my mom he might need his oxygen adjusted. (The kitchen was the closest room to their bedroom, with only their bathroom and the laundry room between, and we were in a mobile home with thin walls. Mom was in the living room, the other side of the kitchen, and my siblings were probably in their bedrooms.) I then went back to washing dishes while she adjusted him to make him more comfortable. She stepped into the bathroom to run bathwater, then went back into the bedroom to make sure he was breathing better–and he was gone. She called his name several times, with more urgency each time, and then she said his name with a sob and “Darling.” My hands froze in the dishwater. She then said, “Kids, come; I think your dad is gone,” and I went in. I felt for his pulse on his wrist, and then I felt for it on his dialysis shunt (that had a frighteningly strong pulse, as they brought several veins together), and when there was no pulse there, I knew he was indeed dead.

    That was more than 34 years ago; he never knew me as an adult. He grew up on a farm and had a great love for (and knowledge of) God’s creation. Since I’ve married my husband, I’ve often wished that just once we could have my dad along on one of our walks, introduce the two men, and Dad and I could swap knowledge about the creatures and the trees. He’d be past 100, and that isn’t a realistic dream, but it’s still one I think of from time to time.

    Liked by 3 people

  43. I have a lovely stepmother. My dad has been gone over 10 years, my stepmother still tells me she loves me. One of my sorrows is that after she took care of her daughter, her mother, and my dad while they were dying, she developed and was diagnosed with Parkinson’s. If anyone deserves to live out their life in joy, she does. She handled the Parkinson’s the way she has handled everything else in her life. She smiles and the world smiles back.

    Liked by 5 people

  44. After all this talk of death and dying, are you ready for a little levity?

    On one of the Facebook pages for my town (these are not run by the town, but by regular citizens), a lady asked what was going on by the Stafford Coffee Company (where we met Kevin and Mrs. B).

    A clever guy replied, “Something must be brewing.”

    Liked by 3 people

  45. I don’t think we can discount the horrible loneliness of a widower or widow. We always felt my mother, who had many friends, would have fared much better than my father did in losing his spouse. My father didn’t really have any friends–they were all through my mother.

    We’ve got a good friend here who lost his wife three years ago in a dreadful accident. Then his house burned down. His story is Job-like, but now the house is being rebuilt and he’ll soon be in his own home.

    He takes no pleasure in it. He’s desperately lonely and wants nothing more than to be married again. I get that. However, I think he needs to get some counseling to deal with other issues before he’ll be appealing to a woman. How do you say that to someone?

    We pray. I don’t know what else to do.

    Liked by 3 people

  46. I missed being with my dad when he died in the hospital. Mom, Hubby, and one of Dad’s sisters was there, and I think my brother was there, too. Having seen Dad, who was in a coma by that time, for a while earlier in the day, I was home taking care of my MIL.

    After I told Mom that I felt bad for not being there when he died, she told me that Dad was proud of me for taking care of Mary and all my responsibilities, so he would be proud of me for doing what needed to be done. That made me feel good.

    Liked by 3 people

  48. Michelle – I’ve often thought that as hard as this is for me, I would rather go through it than have Hubby go through it from losing me. Although he was the one with health issues, he would sometimes tear up and say he didn’t want to lose me. As hard as this has been for me, I think it would have been harder for him, for similar reasons as you mentioned.

    But I also know that J and JoAnne would have adopted him at church, like they did me.

    Liked by 1 person

  50. I, on the other hand, would have to sell this house and move. After living alone for 8 years, for whatever reason, I cannot stand to be alone in this house. I especially don’t like to be alone at night in it.

    Liked by 1 person

  51. Speaking of being afraid to be alone at night. . . That is something I’ve been able to avoid, thanks to the fact that for his last 20 years or so, Hubby worked jobs that involved getting up and out the door in the middle of the night. For his last couple jobs, he would be up around midnight, often a little before. So I learned to be alone in the wee hours of the night a long time ago.

    At first, when he began that first job with those hours, I had a lot of trouble going back to sleep after he left, and I positioned my head to face the door, so I could quickly see in case I might hear something. After a while, I could turn the other way and go right to sleep. Now, I sleep with a sleep mask on, and don’t worry about anything bad happening. I am thankful for that, as I can imagine how difficult that must be for some.

    Liked by 2 people

  53. Cheryl – You may remember that Nightingale and I initially planned on adding her name to my account. But we thought of the possible tax implications, and decided against it.

    Like

  54. I saw the link, but didn’t see a reason not to add Chuck to my account. If I should become incapacitated, even briefly, there is no one to pay our monthly bills.

    Liked by 2 people

  55. Chas, here’s another article on the subject. The first one I read (which wasn’t either of these) actually popped up by accident when I was opening something else, and I couldn’t link to it, since it’s link was actually another article. So I googled the subject to find something on it, since my widowed sister plans to put her almost-20-year-old son on the bank account, and these articles have quite a few reasons that’s a bad idea.

    https://www.tricitiesbusinessnews.com/2018/02/children-bank-account/

    Among the reasons it’s a bad idea: if you have more than one child (which you don’t), the child on your account might get a larger percentage of the inheritance than you actually intend (because the account won’t be going through the will, and thus it won’t be divided with the other children–and if that child chooses to divide it with the other children, then it might be subject to gift tax). Also, that child may have to pay gift tax if the account is seen as a gift to the child. If that child gets sued, your bank account and/or your house (whatever has the child’s name on it) may be vulnerable. If that child divorces, your account may go to pay the ex-spouse. Your child might use the money inappropriately. Most of these wouldn’t apply to Chuck, but it simply makes the account holder vulnerable. They also give better ways to give the child access to the money if it is needed: giving the child your power of attorney, for instance, or setting up a trust. The articles give multiple ways it can be dangerous to do it by putting the child’s name on the account or the house.

    Liked by 1 person

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