Update

A voicemail was waiting for me when I got off work:  My father-in–law is hospitalized with pneumonia. 

Last night, my husband told me his dad started drinking again a month ago.  "As long as I'm drinking whisky I'm fine.   It's beer that gets me in trouble.  I'm staying the hell away from beer, don't you worry.  Whisky, though, whisky's no problem."

Thomas and I both think he's decided he'd rather die of cirrhosis than emphysema.  Can't say I blame him.   Well, yes I can, he's leaving four children and nine grandkids.  His wife, while admittedly my least favorite person on the planet, probably deserves not to watch her husband drink himself to death.  Deserves is not the word I'm looking for.  Sounds too much like something she might say.  What does any of us deserve, really?   Not to be typecast as an irredeemable asshole by our own spouse so she can enhance her wholesomer than thou self image, I might argue.  While we are talking about who deserves what, allow me to propose that having every dish one cooks for one's in laws ignored if not outright mocked is not treatment consistent with what I have reason to believe is my very low level of karmic debt.  The absence of glittery holiday sweatshirts in a wardrobe is not to be mistaken for a deficiency of hygiene or morals.

As I was saying, I think we all can agree that, drowning in a dry room, your lungs filling with whatever it is they fill with over the course of years months days while you fight harder for every breath, this is an awful way to go.  Maybe it’s only because the degenerate drunk in the family is my favorite relation by a long shot, but I’m inclined to sympathize with the desire to cop out of that fate.  And the accompanying hectoring.

Rick took the whole extended family to an indoor waterpark last weekend.  Over beers in the jungle themed bar, my husband and his two full sisters gave Jodi, their newly discovered half sibling, the lowdown on childhood in Chez Rick.  She cried.  Julie, the legitimate daughter only six months Jodi's junior, might have been a little mean, the way women in this family are, sometimes only out of habit, to other women.  Julie is vicious even to her eleven year old son's girlfriend of the same age.  You've gotta figure a bonus sibling from just bairly before Rick was married to Patti is gonna get hazed something fierce.  It doesn't help that Rick is his best self to this blank slate of an offspring.  He apologizes when he swears in front of Jodi, calls her nearly every night for no reason other than to chat.

I wasn't in attendance at the waterpark shindig, though Thomas tells me Julie’s husband wished out loud that I was there.  They do like me, in their own way.  I might not be Christian enough, I might not be trustworthy with children, but I have my charms, I am missed. 

Strange to say, I miss them, too.  I don’t like them most of the time, but I do love them, even Julie, even Patti.   It should be a comforting realization, but as is often the case, the epiphany comes too late.  My existential crises has taken it’s toll.  Barring the involvement of deities or groveling the likes of which I have heretofore been incapable, Thomas and I are getting divorced.  He’s leaving me, of all things.  If you’ve been following along, and noticed my absence of late, that’s why.  I’ve only got so much stomach for introspection just now.

Comments

[djinn]

And only now I come to read this.

Yeah.
*ping*

I certainly can't think of anything else to say.

[Keith]

This has been on my desktop now for almost 24 hours and I still don't know what to do.

Doesn't seem quite right to say, I'm thinking of you, and leave it at that when in fact I've never met you. But I am thinking of you. Of where your life is at. Of how people relate and continually move in and out of each other's lives.

Sometimes it seems to me there are so many things to think about that I'm surprised any real living actually gets done.

[Bakerina]

Everything I have said to you already, in email, on the phone, on Scrine, I repeat ten thousand times.

If you need any company, I will call you so fast that my cellphone will melt. (I know, I know, if the phone melts, I won't be able to call you. I'll try dialing just a little bit slower. ;)

[jo]

Oh man! I'm sorry you have so much shit on your plate! Gah

['mouse]

Sending you some best wishes because that's all I can do. Oh, that and a little emoticon hug. I can do that too.

(hug)

[Pearl]

I don't really know what to say but I have heard you. Hang on.

[pam]

I'm conflicted! I want to sail over the moon with you, I don't know if you know it but your writing is full of brightness and hope, even when the subject matter is intense. At the same time I want to sit quietly and mourn this painful turn of events. I'm so sorry and feel deeply for you. Is it for sure?

Two years later the pain of my own divorce is still keenly felt. Let me know if there's anything I can do, I'll be thinking about you.