It has been a decade since I wrote my son’s obituary. I posted it the next day.
Lew Rockwell posted it the day after I posted it.
Writing it eased the pain. Writers often write to ease the pain. When you are depressed, work. Work is a productive pain-killing drug.
Warning: If you ever get tingling sensations in your heels, and they move up your calves, then thighs, always moving higher, year by year, get to the Mayo Clinic. They will become spasms when they reach your lower back. They will keep moving up until they are inside your skull. Read the obituary for more details.
I did not know at the time I wrote the obituary where the police found his body in his one-room apartment. It was not on the floor or in bed or slumped in a chair. This is rare, as you might imagine. His body was slumped face-down on the counter next to the kitchen sink. They surmised that he had walked over to the sink, suffered a seizure, died instantly, and fell face-down. The horizontal weight of his upper body supported his entire body. It never hit the floor.
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THE HOLE IN YOUR LIFE
When a close relative dies, you must adjust. There had been a relationship. Now it is gone.
Death is irreversible. We know this, but it is driven home when someone close to you dies. The finality is inescapable. There are no loopholes.
We do not normally bury our children. They bury us. So, we regard our relationships with them as permanent for us, though not for them. Then this permanence ends. This creates a hole in our lives. When death comes without warning, we are unprepared for this size of this hole.
It seems as though it will not fill up. This is correct. It never does. But time moves on, and life’s events are like weeds in a field. They fill up our…