Requiem For A Brother In Law

We were notified Tuesday night that my brother-in-law passed away.

As of this writing, we do not fully know the cause of death - given the world that we currently live in, the fear (of course) is The Current Plague.  From what was related, it seems most likely that it was a heart attack - but unfortunately, he was running a low grade fever that day.  We will know the test results tomorrow. 

She literally found him just as he was passing.

The image of all of this, of course, is made much worse by the fact of the Plague we are now in.  Literally at one point, everyone was out on the front driveway, six feet apart from each other, waiting for the funeral home to arrive to pick up the body.  My sister in law is effectively in quarantine with her second son in the house.  At the current time, no-one can come by, not even my mother-in-law (who lives in the same town) because of the potential unknown risk.

Such is the world we now live in.

My brother-in-law was someone that I had known 12 years but only had as a brother in law for 8 months.  He was an incredible handyman and one of the most kind and welcoming people I have ever met.  He is one of the sorts of folks of which it could be said there were not strangers for him, just friends that he had not met.

He had struggles with drugs long before we met him but had come out on the other side thanks to Narcotics Anonymous (NA), which was a huge part of his and my sister-in-law's life (in fact, where they met and started dating).  Judging from his friends that I did met and numerous attestations on The Book of Face,  he impacted the lives of countless others through his sponsorship, his mentorship, and his guidance.

The one comment I made to my sister-in-law when I talked to her was his forgiving nature.  He had terrible problems around the relationship with his children - on their part, not his, to the point that they had completely stopped talking to him and had refused to come the wedding last August.  In all of this, I never heard him once say a bitter or negative thing about this whole situation.  He was sad - incredibly sad - at the outcome, but not at all bitter.

Now, of course, that relationship can never be repaired.

Death is a reality that the sudden arrival of The Current Plague did nothing to change - for thousands of people, every day, death was a reality that was poignantly apparent although somehow ignored by the world in which we live.  Occasionally we recognized when a celebrity or famous person passed away, but the reality of the fact that we all are to die was carefully secreted away by us, consciously or unconsciously, to avoid a subject perhaps too painful to consider.

I leave you with four thoughts today:

1)  We - none of us - know how much time we have.  We do not know the day of our outgoing, always assuming that it will years and years from where we now.  To be this way is to be fly on the wall, mistaking the shadow that is coming over you to be a cloud rather than the fly swatter to end your life.

2)  With this in mind, how are we spending our time?  Perhaps more relevantly, how am I spending my time?  I reflect back to last August, where somehow having to take an extra day off work to be there a day earlier for their wedding was a burden to my life.  The work is now gone and really does not matter; the day earlier that I was there now has all the importance in the world.

3) Are we spending our time rightly?  It seems a little silly to ask this question now given the state of the world, but I think the question is worth asking all the more.  We have identified millions of people as "non-essential" to the marginally effective working of society.  To these people, 40 hours of their week (or more) were tied up in what they did for a living.  Now for many, this has been stripped away.

But I count even myself in this category.  Is what I have done with my time the best thing that could have been done?  The most important thing? 

4)  My sister-in-law also said that she was grateful in that she knew that she had a great relationship and that for so many, they could together for years and years without having that same level of involvement and commitment.  It is true, of course - we probably all know couples that have been together for an eternity but without any real relationship - maybe they had it at one time, but it has been cast out over the years.  Are we - really, am I - doing what I can to have better relationships all around?  Or am I just satisfied with the minimum?

The death of loved one is inevitably a time to stop, pause, and take stock.  Would that now - when Death is forever in the news - be a time where we all take a good hard reflection of where we are in our lives and what we really need to be about.