A final bit on my grief story. My three children. They’ve all been supportive. They backed me on my decision to move their mother to memory care, and they’ve been there for me since she passed. We play music together, we visit, we talk, we’re close. Of course, the processing of grief is a private affair, so they’re each processing the loss in their own way. I often wonder if I’ve done enough for them. I should ask even if I might not like the answer.

And stepping back from the kids, I’ve received a lot of support from her brothers and sisters and my cousins and her cousins. And we all still stay in touch even as death has visited their doors binding us even closer in the grip of life and death, the eternal story that gets told every single day in a myriad of ways in a million places to millions of people.

And I guess that’s one of the things that helps me carry on. I’m not the only one. This is not some singular tragedy never before visited upon mankind. Death is a ubiquitous fact of life. It will strike and has struck everyone, and we will all feel and have felt pain each in our own way. And what I’ve learned is the importance of the living and of living and the need I have for others, a need they likely have as well. All tempered by the knowledge of my fallibility and the likelihood that somewhere along the way, I’ve made a mistake or two that might need correcting when it comes to being supportive myself.