Strange Complaints

Having a weekly column is a bit like having an opportunity to go back in time and check in on yourself. At any point if I want to kind of see what I was doing at a certain point in my life over the last 20 years, I can simply search the word column in my sent emails.

There I can read about our first dog, Ellie, and how she joyfully jumped into our life and on my wife as she was trying to leave to go to work.

I can read about every birthday in our family and how my anxiety handled getting older each year (not well typically).

I can read about the painful moments in my life where I’ve lost family members, as well as work-family members, where you realize that the pain you felt in that moment is often only a hair’s breadth away even decades later. Then again, so was the love.

I can see the slow evolution of my mother-in-law needing more and more help that we could not provide her while living in Louisiana until she finally came live with us as we helped her through the final chapters in her life.

I can see even slower evolution of my frustration with her and that situation as it turned into admiration and a deep deep love and respect. Dementia is a hell of a thing to see someone you love go through.

Going through my emails I can see a lot of things that I wish I could have seen in advance…Life doesn’t work that way however and that’s okay.

It’s just kind of comforting to know that in a weird way these columns are sort of like a diary to me. I can go back and get a sense of how I arrived where I am and of the people and places I loved enough to write about along the way.

It was one of those people actually that got me reminiscing and thinking as it would’ve been her birthday today… which caused this trip down memory lane.

Happy birthday, Aunt Dorothy. Miss you.