Things that suck (in the real world)

Last updated on: May 6, 2016 at 7:29 am by Jane the Actuary

Things that suck (in the real world) 2016-05-06T07:29:55-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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So amidst all the hand-wringing about Trump and Clinton, my father-in-law passed away last night. He was 75.

He’d been in ill-health for quite some time; three years ago, he had heart surgery and never fully recovered, but was doing well enough that he and my mother-in-law visited a year ago for my youngest’s first communion, and seemed to be doing okay-ish.

But three weeks ago, he got an infection severe enough that antibiotics had no effect, and the decision was made that a risky repeat heart surgery was needed; the surgery took place on Tuesday and he didn’t survive much past it.

Was he a particularly brilliant, highly accomplished man? Did he leave a great legacy of some kind? No, not really – he was a master carpenter who later took a sales job. But he passed on to my husband his carpentry skills, and appreciation of biking and hiking. And he’ll be missed by his family, near and far.

And in the meantime, my own parents are coming to visit, for the first time in three years. They live in the Detroit area, so it’s about a five hour drive, and after Dad’s hospitalizations and rehab stays and strict instructions from the doctor not to drive, Mom has been nervous about doing all the driving herself, and yet unwilling to actually make the change to flying here, but she finally decided to use the occasion of my youngest’s birthday coming up on Monday to make the trip — and the plan is for her to drive only as far as Michigan City, taking as many stops as they need, and then my husband, who needed to spend the day at his employer’s office in Chicago tomorrow anyway, will take the South Shore line out that way, meet them, and do the rest of the driving. So we’ll see how that goes.

Growing up, it was natural to us that grandparents were seen only rarely, given that one set lived 10 hours away by car, so we’d see them in the summer on our vacation, and the other set lived even further away; we only drove out there three times, growing up, plus their occasional visits to us. (And for our family of five to drive was out of the question, though the grandparents did fly to us.) Now, so many of the people in our community have parents and extended family nearby: sometimes in the metro area, other times even in the same town or neighborhood — one of our neighbors lives across the street from her mother!

(Could we have similarly made the choice to stay in the Detroit area? Not really – that’s not where the jobs were; and, besides, in my experiences to that point, no one did so, so it didn’t even occur to us.)

So my feelings for my father-in-law’s passing are mixed in with thinking about my parents’ impending visit, and not knowing how they’ll do, how the drive will work out, whether they’ll be able to manage anything more than just staying at home, given their own physical limitations. And I contemplated scheduling a tour of the retirement community near us, in the hopes that seeing the place in person would entice them (it’s a really nice place!), but, reality is, they’ve rejected the idea of moving too many times — even though it kills me to watch them live their lives of inactivity, and, with their closest family being my sister, living 45 minutes away and unable to help much, there’s always a feeling of doom, that Something will Go Wrong, that one or the other of them will find themselves incapacitated as quickly as my father-in-law, well — anyway, the trouble is, we wouldn’t be able to help, and it would become a very difficult situation.

And beyond that, there’s the sadness of wishing my kids could know/have known their grandparents better.

So that’s how my day’s been. How was yours?

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