Grief

I have wanted to apologize to my readers for not writing more long short stories or compiling them into books for you to read. However, starting with the death of my mother and then before that my favorite Aunt, one of my favorite female cousins, and since 2006 two of my oldest and best friends to where I have only one childhood friend left and he mostly we have skied and climbed mountains together since I was 21, it has been hard to feel anything but grief about my friends and my previous life. I still have one male cousin who is still working at the business he owns that I sail with in southern California. But, for the most part my relatives my age or older are either dead or we have drifted apart over the years and live far away in another state.

Each of us is defined by how others see us as well as how we see ourselves. So, as friends and associates die in some ways we die too because their perspective of us dies with them and we are also diminished with each death.

So, in a way we then become a beacon to others to live on, for our children and grandchildren and friends.

I have watched friends without children or spouses sort of wither away starting at around late 40s or early 50s and it is very difficult to watch.

So, having a family and friends is one of the reasons one stays alive to give them strength and comfort and to be comforted by family as well.

However, this series of changes has also changed me in that I am not as enthused by writing as I once was, especially in longer tales even though everything I write tends to be based upon truths I have personally experienced in the past, present or future already.

So, I guess I'm apologizing to my readers that I haven't written more long things and here I'm listing why. As people you are close with pass on it leaves you sort of in a state of shock and alone and one has to learn to cope with all this and find a way forward. And this year added to this is "Empty Nest Syndrome" which for me is actually even more difficult than friends and relatives passing on because the role that has most defined me as an adult over 26 has been father and businessman. Though I have the fantasy of seeing myself as an adventurer like many men who like to travel do, still it does not define me in as deep a way as father and businessman do or did.

So, I'm trying to find a way forward with my youngest now far away in college. So, even though I have the means to visit my children whenever I want to, still I don't want to be a burden on them either. So, finding when it is both useful and fun for us all to get together is more difficult and interesting than before when one or more of them lived with my wife and I.

So, though we have almost complete freedom in our lives and our finances and health are okay for the most part, still there are still challenges in our lives to be met every day as well.

I am incredibly lucky to have all my kids either graduated from college or in college now and my step kids and God daughters are all very successful or college educated or both. So, in this my wife and I feel we have been very successful as parents and mentors of the next generation and generations to come. My wife sits on the board of a non-profit and I write and travel and visit my children and friends. Life is good.

Hopefully, I will start writing longer stuff sometime soon. I miss the fun of writing something interesting and more long winded, so hopefully that is coming in the future too.

Writing something longer is a little like falling in love. Only with writing you are falling in love with an idea, a story, and hopefully a true story. And as you develop that hopefully true story you often fall more and more in love with that idea and in telling that story correctly so others can benefit from it.

So, there is a joy both in writing it and in sharing it with others. (At least this is true of me). And this resembles often affairs of the heart when I was young. Then later, one pulls out what one has written and reads it years later and is amazed how good it was they way one wrote it of how it conveys (or doesn't convey) what you intended in the first place.

IT is sort of like affairs of the heart when you look back and some of them that burned very bright but in the end you likely couldn't have stayed with that person for this reason or that. But still, it touches your heart that you experienced all that. Like it is said, "It is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all." As painful as this is it is also true.

Or as one of my God Daughter's always says, "Timing is everything in relationships!"