It’s been weeks, almost a month, since my last post here. I used to post almost every-other-day, hence the name, almost-daily diary. Life has gotten in the way. A whole lot of excuses, mostly dealing with various family medical issues (my wife with Stage 4 cancer, my 93 year old mother with a large meningioma pushing her brain out of place and causing verbal and motor skill issues, my son’s continuing seizures from his epilepsy, my daughter’s Ehlers Damlos syndrome that causes joints to be super-flexy and not in a good way).

I should add, of all these things, the most-hopeful near-term outcome is actually my mom’s brain thingee. She’s scheduled for surgery Monday and the prognosis is really good!

I go home and feel like there’s a choice to be made, spending time writing about things, or spending time with my wife. The norm is trying to find a balance of taking care of yourself and others, having your own projects, your wife has her projects, and you find time to do things you enjoy together. It’s ok that she has her TV shows and you have yours. I would spend time after each ride, looking for photos to give a “you are there” feeling to what I was writing.

But then someone puts a limit on time, in this case my wife’s time. She’s doing well on Keytruda and hopefully will be around for years! Her expiration date has already passed at least once, and we hope she can keep on going. But that’s a hope, not a certainty, and it feels wrong, even selfish, for me to spend time at home doing something on my own, while she does something on her own.

I think my dad would want me writing about that. My search for a meaningful relationship, ways to make my wife’s life better, while there’s this cloud of uncertainty hanging over everything. How does that change what you do? Well for one thing, it changes how I’ve planned our next vacation; I’ve had to look into and buy insurance to cover the non-refundable cost of the cruise itself. I’ve learned that you don’t have to worry about the expensive airline tickets because, at least with United, the standard non-refundable tickets, the tickets where, if you can’t make the trip, you can get a credit towards a future trip that might not happen if my wife isn’t around… United will actually do a complete refund if you can’t make the trip due to illness or worse.

I wish I didn’t have to learn those things. Paradoxically, I wish I’d already been taught them long ago. Life doesn’t prepare you for life. We go along our merry way, complaining to the end of the world about things that don’t really matter that much. And we discover that a roller-coaster existence, dealing with health issues that have you feeling great for a while, then not so good, then great again, just kind of all over the map… well that’s not a fun roller coaster to be on.

I believe my father would have kept on writing at a time like this. I could be wrong; I’m not sure when he actually stopped writing, and how his illness affected that. He might have already moved on from writing long before he died. He’d left writing for a while to sell Real Estate, which, to me, didn’t seem like a good fit. He died at not-quite-57, a good 11 years younger than I am today. I suppose I can say I kept it up longer than he did (he was the Sports Editor for the local newspaper back when local newspapers were a big thing, so writing was literally his profession). I never asked him why he wrote. For me, it was a need, and still is. I keep a lot of stuff bottled up if I don’t write. Why did my dad start writing, and did he stop? You’d think I’d know.

This is morphing in odd directions. It’s now become things I don’t know about my father. I thought I knew what I needed to know. Now, I’m not so sure. In the meantime, I need to keep working on a life that makes sense, for everyone around me.