the platitudes of willful resemblance

I should really get back to the business of blogging now.
My father-in-law and friend, Bob, died this morning. We have long known this day would come and the suddenness was unexpected all the same. Tomorrow would be his 63rd birthday. Happy birthday Bob. a short and simple obit.

for Bob, death in the morning

you are beyond the grave and soon will be ashes
how short this life!
how this pain has ended!
I am not sorry for us, for
we had known you,
I am not sorry for death
as it is mercy;
I am not sorry for you
as you were magnanimous
and not even death can
remove this magnanimity.

 – Hoc Scripsi

the second and third – 2&3 – 23, isn’t there something significant about that?

my father-in-law is dying and I am losing a good friend, a man I deeply admired.
I’ve switched to autopilot and my wife has had to be the stronger of us.
I don’t grieve well and I do so silently, she headlongs into projects and gets everything done. my wife, my constant hero and I do what I can for her.
Eventually the words will come and for now I cannot convey the depth of my sadness. his wife, his daughter are in mourning’s bondage and we are all walking with him to the end of his many years of struggle.
We go to hospice tomorrow – it is an unfortunate 2 hours away in a veterans home – he has lived there for the past 6.5 years.

It has taken me a long time to write this much. it is hard to lose such a good man.

I grieve

I grieve slowly,
quietly.

occupying the hours of
a day with meditations

of death and the dead.
often I consider my own death

and am not unnerved by it as
death is one end only.

it is ever the patient student
of the dead that practices life

so fully
as to die with ease.

 – Hoc Scripsi