orphan-a-versary

this year i’m gonna play along and change my facebook profile pic for a couple of days to this…

as a kid this was my favorite pic of my parents because they’re both smiling (in fact, mom is clearly laughing her ass off) and, to my childhood delight, it has a firetruck in it!

(fun fact – “firetruck” is the one word that starts with “f” and ends with “uck” that you could say in front of my folks and NOT get lectured…)

today marks four years since we lost dad to what, we found out weeks later, was covid. or complications from it. not to fuel the naysayers, but while that was the death nail to say he had a “preexisting condition” is a bit of an understatement. he was seventy-eight years old, had zero immune system thanks to a kidney transplant almost one year prior, and was working between four hospitals tirelessly in what we now know was the precursor to a major global health event.

pretty much game, set, match.

but it happened to fall on the eve of the anniversary of mom’s death several years before. so now their deaths are forever tied, which always brings up romantic notions from folks that don’t know the back story. there was no great pearly gates reunion with these two, i guarantee it. the couple above no longer existed. that was 1963 – mom left in 1996, dad in 2020. by then it was a lifetime later and a lifetime of change. but, once again, in death they found a way to tie themselves together, at least in the minds of their children, with back to back death-a-versaries.

funny how life works.