Bad year for health & friends, but a great family

A new year?

Boy, did we need one.

Queen Elizabeth II once referred to a year late in the last century as an annus horribilis, and except for the fact that I'd probably get snarky about the first word, I might be tempted to describe 2018 with that same phrase.

I have two very close friends I have known forever. One lost his wife on Thanksgiving Day, the other lost his mother on Christmas Day. That one had been chronically ill for years and the other was 88 years old may have made it less surprising, but that's about all.

My own mother is slipping away. She'll be 92 next month, and she has outlived her husband of 52 years -- my dad -- by more than a decade. I have nine siblings, five of them brothers and sisters in-law, one one of them learned recently of an advanced case of liver cancer.

Albanie

I don't remember who it was who said it first, but we all reach a point in our lives when life begins taking away more than it gives us. The "gifts" it has been giving me in recent times are chronic arthritis pain in my neck and upper spine, stenosis somewhere in that same area that has me almost blacking out at times, and worsening pain in my left hip that has me worrying I'll need a hip replacement.

Oh, and assuming I live another 344 days, I'll "celebrate" my 70th birthday in December.

Seventy.

Damn.


It isn't as if there won't be good things happening in 2019. My son Virgile and his wife Sterling will return home this summer after three years in Paraguay. They'll be spending two years in the Washington, D.C., area before going back out on another tour in 2021.

Pauline's brood

My daughter Pauline, her husband Johnathan and my six blended grandchildren will be in Guatemala for another year and a half, and maybe we'll get down there again at some point. I certainly hope so. There are few things that give me more joy than those six kids.

It was wonderful to get to see them in Minnesota this summer. Little Albanie in particular is becoming a real star at age 4.

Nicole and I are in our 27th year of marriage now, and I feel truly blessed by God to have made it this far. A little more than four years ago she was diagnosed with Lewy Body Dementia and we were told she would be slipping away mentally within two years in we were lucky.

The thing was, she didn't deteriorate.

Nicole a few years ago

She got better, and a year later she scored amazingly high on the same cognition test. It turned out it was a wrong diagnosis, and the future looks a lot brighter.

She's less than a year younger than me, but she's a good deal younger at heart.

I'm going to have to work on that.

***

The last couple of years have been miserable for me as far as writing. If you look at the archives with this site, I had 344 posts the first four years, but just 18 in 2017 and only seven the year that just ended.

That ends now. I may not write as many long posts as I have, but I'm going to post something at least three times a week.

That's a resolution I can keep.