I lost my Dad this week. At 82 years of age, he'd lived a long life pretty much on his own terms. Congestive Heart Failure kept him in and out of hospitals for the last six months, and in ICU for two weeks.
It was in ICU where he realized the end was near. We had our most meaningful conversations there, in spite of his growing weakness. Lots of "Remember when" stories, a few "What if" stories, and sadly, very few words of final wishes. Fortunately, he'd mostly settled that with my stepmother.
I and a few other family members were present at the moment of his passing. There is no greater closure than to be holding the hand of a loved one as the end comes, and I'm forever grateful to have been there when the end came for Dad.
A few hectic days followed, mostly involving legal documents and such. Tonight, my wife, son, and I went to see a ballet and returned to find our cat of 17 years dead on his blanket. I'm one of those "pets are family too" people so this hit doubly hard.
Hat tip to any Gram Parsons fans who noticed my paraphrasing the title of this post from Gram's song "Thousand Dollar Wedding".
Author, editor, blogger, and so much more Shaun Mullen has passed. Noting his blog Kiko's House hadn't been updated in a while, I did a search and discovered his obituary . My friendship with Shaun goes back to 2006. While living in Australia, I'd discovered his blog when searching for informed commentary on US foreign policy in the Middle East. Sadly, much of that policy remains unchanged 14 years later, but that is for another post. Shaun had noticed that his blog wasn't rendering correctly in Internet Explorer and asked if anyone could suggest a fix. I, being a bit of a tech head at the time, suggested Firefox or similar browser, and the problem was solved. We kept in and out of touch, finding common ground in music (I mentioned my love for the Grateful Dead and Shaun sent a dozen CDs of concert recordings. By International mail. The man was generous to a fault.), worldview, and more. My old site got its greatest number of hits when Shaun linked to a few of m
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