This post has been sitting in my drafts for about a month now... This time of the year is hard; my Dad's birthday would have been the 9th, the anniversary of my Mom passing is the 23rd, last year my Dad passed away on April 9th, and then a about a month later we had to put Daisy to sleep, finally, my Mom's birthday was May 9th, always right around mother's day.

So, I haven't been able to finish this post, until now.

My wife got Ella when she was just a kitten, her friend's mom used to breed ragdolls. That was 18 years ago. My wife and I hadn't even met yet, so when we got together I knew up front that it was a package deal; “the dog and the cat have to like you, otherwise this isn't going to work.”

Thankfully, they did like me, and Ella wasn't like any other cat that I had ever met before. Which is why it was so hard having to say goodbye to her.

Quite frankly, Ella was almost annoyingly affectionate at times. She just could not get enough attention, and it didn't really matter who it was. It just happened to be me a lot of the time. Ella was aggressively affectionate, even.

I still maintain that I'm not much of a cat person. My wife has joked about having more cats, but I always put my foot down. Vowing to never have another cat.

SURE, no two pets are every the same, even if you're fond of a particular breed, they each have their own personalities. But I definitely made an exception for Ella. I wasn't the only one either, all of our friends who weren't cat people felt the same way. Ella really WASN'T like any other cat they had ever met.

Before my Mom's Alzheimer's got real bad, I used to go and pick up my parents on Sundays and bring them over for dinner. Usually while I was cooking, my parents would hang out in the living room and have a beer or two, my Mom really enjoyed just sitting on the couch and petting Ella, and I know Ella looked forward to it too. Any excuse to to be loved.

She was never an outdoor cat, but became one when we moved into our house. Daisy learned how to use the doggy door and Ella just decided that was also for her, but she never went beyond the fence of our yard, she never climbed out and explored... Except for one time. A late night wind storm blew open our RV gate. I woke up early that next Saturday morning, and I found it odd that as I was getting my coffee neither of the pets were in the house to greet me good morning. Daisy knew she wasn't supposed to leave, so she was just standing there looking out at the open space.

“Daisy, where's Ella?”

Looking at me, and then back out to the exposed neighborhood, Daisy didn't have to say anything, the sad expression on her face was really all I needed. I somewhat frantically woke my wife to let her know that we had to go search for the cat. For at least an hour my wife was in denial.

In tired exacerbation my wife exclaimed: “She has to be here somewhere, she's probably just hiding!”

Not knowing when exactly the gate had blown open, we drove to the shelter, we knocked on neighbors' doors, we stopped any morning joggers, just about anything you can imagine.

But just as we had all buy given up hope of finding her, my wife made another attempt to scout the neighborhood, and there she was. One house down and across the street in the neighbor's yard

She also used to listen, too. I remember one of those Sundays my Mom got so excited when I called Ella inside from the back yard. I used to have conversations with her all the time.

We think she might have had a combination of different health issues. But really didn't start to show any signs that anything was wrong until the very end. We tried to treat her for hyperthyroidism, but she stopped eating and lost a lot of weight really quickly. Seemed like within just a couple of weeks her health went downhill. So we didn't really have much of a choice, and even if we had, there aren't very many options for 18 year old cats.

I'll say the same thing about Ella that I did with Daisy; I'm really going to miss her, I've never known any other cats with such a loving personality. And there definitely haven't been any other cats who have been such a big part of my life.

Quite a lot has happened in my personal life. Some of it I've shared, other stuff, not so much. The pain of loss is probably the hardest thing I've ever had to go through. But to lose my Dad and my dog in the same month has been an especially terrible to experience. A bit compounded by the fact that last Friday (May 9th) would have also been my Mother's birthday.

It's a morbid and depressing part of life for anyone who has ever had pets, but putting them to sleep is part of the process after they've lived a full life. I have to say that our experience with the service we used was the lowest stress possible... They came to the house and it was really quite peaceful. We were warned that there might be some erratic breathing or other “distress”, but Daisy went with just a sigh. Which was heart-wrenching and bittersweet, because her sigh was something that I was quite fond of. She was always doing it in protest; “No, you can't get on the couch right now.” sigh. “You already have food! You don't need to bug me for mine.” sigh... I'm so sorry girl, it's time. sigh.

We spent the day just feeding Daisy treats, crying, and giving her lots of pets. Eventually the doorbell rang and the vet was there to administer a couple of shots. Daisy fell asleep and that was it.

A couple of images will probably never leave my mind. Ella, our cat, wandering over and saying goodbye, and helping to carry Daisy out of the house. Not that she was especially heavy, in fact I had grown quite accustomed to lifting her in and out of the bathtub over the last year and half. She had gotten to the point where she couldn't stand up to relieve herself, so we were constantly having to bathe her. But more than a few times in just the past couple of months, sitting in the living room and watching TV, I would look over and could see that Daisy was in pain.

Originally we had Daisy scheduled for a visit at the vet's office. When I came home on Friday after work I had to help my wife clean up the house because Daisy had diarrhea again. Wasn't long before I broke down in tears when I realized there was blood in her stool. The earliest appointment they could give us was for Sunday at 8:30am.

We had all day Saturday to think about everything. My wife and I talked about it in bed that night, and we realized it was just time. For me personally, I couldn't see a situation where the vet would let us bring Daisy home with us. She was in really rough shape on Friday night, barely able to walk, and then with blood and a mucus-y substance in her feces, it didn't look good. As she's gotten older, stuff like this has been happening with increasing frequency. Nearly two decades is a long time for a golden retriever.

Daisy wasn't just any golden though, she was a mutt from the pound, mixed with at least border collie, and probably some other breeds sprinkled in as well. To me, she always looked mostly like a golden, but when her ears would perk up that's when you could see the border collie in her, or when she was busy trying to herd my nieces and nephews. It's actually kind of mind blowing to think that Daisy was 5 years older than my youngest niece. Whenever anyone would ask, I usually would just say she was a golden retriever. Border collies being less prevalent as house or family dogs, and much more of a working breed.

Daisy was Skyler's dog first, I came along after, a few years later even. When my wife got Daisy, she was only 11 months old but had already been returned to the pound twice. She was a wild puppy, always chewing on things and lashing out. On top of that she only had half a tail. Very aggressive toward men, but never toward me. We suspect she probably was the victim of some type of cruelty, probably whatever resulted in her half of a tail. She was the best dog though. Such a sweetheart. Skyler refused to give up on her, and I didn't have to do much, but she was pretty rambunctious on walks. It wasn't long after I moved in that I found I actually quite enjoyed taking her for walks and getting her trained to be more comfortable on a leash.

When I was younger we owned a few dogs, but we never had them long enough to see any of them put to sleep. I think the longest we had a dog was probably Prince—he was a short-haired collie of some kind—but he was only around for three or four years total. So, with Daisy, twelve years was quite the length of time for me to bond and grow old with a dog.

In a way, Daisy's declining health sort of mirrored my Dad's. For probably two years now she had been on carprofen (basically doggy ibuprofen), and we've had to administer it a couple of times a day for her back and legs, just so that she could get around. Plus we had to give her special eye drops. My wife did it in the beginning, at some point I took over, so that was part of my daily routine before and after work, and a reason to get up early on Saturdays and Sundays. Even if I just woke up and then went back to bed; I would give Daisy her pill and eye drops in the morning.

There were probably a couple of Saturday or Sunday mornings that I forgot, but I could always see the pain in her when she would move around. The pills definitely helped. It got bad in the end though. Just this last week, and periodically throughout the last few months, she had some serious senior moments; signs of dementia, falling down, being tired all the time.

I had secretly been hoping that she would just go in her sleep. However, there is the very serious question of quality of life versus quality of care. She was getting to the point where it would have been cruel to keep her alive. That was one thing that Skyler said she didn't want, for Daisy to suffer just so that we could keep her around.

We did have a scare several years ago, when we both thought that would could lose Daisy. It was during COVID, she had a fairly large growth on her chest, and the vet wasn't sure whether or not it was benign or cancerous. Daisy was absolutely mopey for like 2 months. She also hated it when you touched the bump, and she was noticeably very self-conscious about it. Wouldn't you know, as soon as they did surgery and got rid of it, Daisy recovered very quickly and was like a little puppy all over again.

It was maybe another year or several months later that I learned what reverse sneezing was. Yes, dogs do it, and it's very scary if you've never experienced it before. She woke me up around 4:30-5am on a weekend. I promptly woke Skyler up, “you gotta listen to Daisy!”

When a dog reverse sneezes, it sounds like they can't breath, or are having difficulty breathing. We took her to the only vet we could find open, which was nearly on the other side of the city, at least a 30-45 minute drive with no traffic. The veterinary assistant who was working at the time didn't seem concerned at all, my wife and I were still half-asleep and freaked out waiting for the vet.

I don't remember what the vet said, I just remember replying with, “what the fuck is a reverse sneeze?!?”

None the less, she had stopped sounding like she was going to die, and was breathing perfectly fine... Probably because we had driven her far, far away from the source of her allergies; whatever weed was growing in our backyard that caused her to start reverse sneezing in the first place.

I'm really going to miss her, I've never known any other dogs with such personality. And there definitely haven't been any other dogs who have been such a big part of my life.

Some people have things in their life that they regret. Sometimes I feel like some of us are more full of regrets than others. My dad was never one to regret anything. A very storied past. I still know all the stories too, and anyone who ever met him would never deny the legend of Jim Kane. “Jimmy Lee!” or “Seamus!” if my Mom was slightly perturbed, or very angry with him, respectively.

There were times I tried to poke and prod him—maybe in the last 5 or 6 years—about telling me all his stories again. Part of the reason being that I wanted to see if he still remembered them, and if they were the same as I remembered. More often than not though, I feel like he would just respond, “you already know all my stories, what am I going to tell you then?”

One of the first things that I noticed when I walked in and saw my Dad's lifeless body on the floor was that he had been holding his phone. In the moment, it stuck out to me as purposeful. Even though he was declining I would see patterns throughout the house. Things setup on the counters for regular use, or oddball items place in specific locations to help an aging mind remember to do the routine thing, whatever it was that needed to be done.

He rarely ever called me, despite my encouragement and reassurance that he was never bothering me. I used to tell him, “Dad, if I can't answer, I won't, but I'll call you back as soon as I get a chance.” That didn't really seem to sway him. My Dad was pretty fiercely independent, even in his old age.

As part of his morning ritual (and especially after my Mom passed) he would listen to music. He told me that he would use his phone in the mornings, read the news, sit and have coffee and just listen to music.

When I left the night before his passing, I told him to make sure that he had his phone on him. I don't know why I thought he might call me, though I suppose I had my suspicions... and whether or not it was his specific intention, I'm going to say that the playlist of music he left me was his way of writing a last will and testament. The songs are very reflective, and I see a lot of his love for my Mom in the lyrics, as well as the sorrow of his loss of her.

He also left me a few swigs of some Dewar's 15 year old scotch that I bought him one Christmas several years ago. Nice and smooth even at room temperature. And I'm thankful that he left it for me, because it was almost as if he knew I was going to need it.

Both of my parents were signed up as full body donors. Part of the medical donation process is an interview with the next of kin about the deceased. The interview for my Mom was relatively quick, and I let my Dad answer those questions. She drank in her youth and smoked weed a couple of times (one of those times was with me), so she was pretty much a “no” for every question that they asked. My Dad, on the other hand, had a laundry list of things that happened to him in his life, or shit that he did with (and to) his own body.

It was hard to see him in pain at the end, but I'm sure he had that one moment looking back, just as the light was taking him, where he would have agreed that the pain was worth the journey. Eventually I'll tell all his stories but they'll probably be mixed in with my fiction so that I don't upset anyone, or have to explain too much.

Has the deceased ever been incarcerated? Have they ever done methamphetamine? How much did the deceased drink? How much did they smoke?

The answer to all of those questions being a resounding “yes,” by the way. He would have been a great one to play “Never Have I Ever” with. Jim was a bit of a caricature at times. He was also the protagonist of his own story, and there were plenty of times where I felt like I lived in his shadow growing up. But he was always just “Dad” to me.

Sex, drugs, and rock n' roll, then prison... Then he met my Mom. They were both in rehab together. They had a pretty tumultuous relationship, before and after my Mother had me. She never said that was I was a mistake, instead I was “the best thing that ever happened” to her. But my parents hadn't planned on having any children. So after I came along there was an adjustment period of about 5-8 years for my Dad while he figured out what it really meant to be a father. Some of my earliest memories of him were seeing him behind a pane of prison glass, having to talk to him through a telephone with a metal cable, and having the time we could visit cut short quite abruptly... If you know, you know.

At one point I had to stop the woman from the medical donation place that was conducting the interview, and just say straight up, “look we can talk about the man's life all day if you want, but that'll take a while. Let's just say that he was a moderate drinker.”

A lot of the problems that my parents had probably could be attributed to my Dad's addictive personality, in particular his drinking, though later in life if would be a predilection toward opiates. Throughout his life, he would go through stints and he had long periods of sobriety. And over the past decade or so, him and I hadn't sat down and had a few drinks with the exception of sharing a beer when my Mom died, but I'll talk about that more later.

It seems pretty surreal that he's gone because I don't have my Mom to commiserate with. My wife is here with me, and she's been amazing through all of this, but she just doesn't know my Dad in the same way that my Mom did, and as I do.

Thankfully the last thing that Dad and I said to each other was, “I love you.” I know that was important to him because his father never said it to him.

I see a lot of myself in him, and I'm not very vocal about my feelings. So, making a playlist of songs is something I absolutely would do to express myself. I know that this was my Dad's way of doing that. Most of these songs I would have never picked out for him. Especially not for his last moments on this plane of existence, so in a way they're also deeply personal songs.

My Dad hadn't really drank since before my Mom passed. He was too busy trying to take care of her, as her alzheimer's progressed it required more and more of his emotion and attention. The way he was able to cope with her decline was with all of the opiates they prescribed for his back—it was a work injury that happened in the mid-2000s. He had been on some form of prescription pain killers and muscle relaxers since then, or for at least the last 20 years. I tried to get him off that stuff, but I could never convince him, so I just let him take the shit. His dependence on the pain killers wasn't as bad as it was toward the end though.

Alcohol doesn't mix well with opiates. As a consequence, I don't think him and I had gotten hammered on a bottle or two of whiskey and a case of beer since before my wife and I met. My grandma had also been living with my parents while my Dad was still working and before he retired.

You can't exactly go to grandma's house and get blind drunk listening to music at full volume in the middle of the night. Which was probably for the best, because my Mom hated it. Nevertheless she did tolerate it when I was younger and it was just the three of us in the house. She'd let my Dad and I bond and have guy time.

Getting trashed with my Dad is something that goes back to when I was 16 or 17. More specifically though, my senior year in high school he let me get drunk with him and his friend, Harold, during the NBA playoffs. We'd drink beers and watch the Lakers with Kobe and Shaq... Used to have to take a drink every time Shaq would miss a free throw. If you know anything about Shaquille O'Neal's free throw percentage, then you are probably laughing about how many drinks that was.

I remember very distinctly being hungover in Mrs. Robert's English class, because my Dad only let me drink if I got my ass up out of bed and went to school the next day. That's what real men did. If you get too drunk the night before, you just have to suck it up and go to work the next day. It was a very clear lesson. In a way, learning that early on has really helped me in life. Addiction and alcoholism can be hereditary, so learning to understand how to navigate that from an early age, and not having to struggle with it as an adult, has been a bit of a blessing, and has made me much stronger willed. I was a straight-A student in high school and graduated as our salutatorian, I even got to give a speech standing in a Masonic hall.

In any case, I hope you've been listening to the playlist at the top of this post while you've been reading along! My Dad picked some really good songs. I knew he liked John Denver, but we mostly only listened to the more popular tunes. “Back Home Again” appears on his original playlist multiple times, “Drift Away” by Dobie Grey is another one, it shows up a few times. Then he puts the Uncle Kracker version on there too! I know for a fact that was NOT a mistake.

“I think he did a great job covering that song!” My Dad would exclaim. Usually in a bit of a drunken stupor.

We used to talk about music a lot. It was a big part of who we were as father and son. My love for music is a gift from both of parents, but even my Mom would have told you, she was terrible about remembering names and dates for songs and musicians. Every once in a while she would remember one, and be very excited about it. My Dad, on the other hand, could name-that-tune in just a couple of notes sometimes.

Last year, or possibly even the year before, I remember picking him up and I was driving us to go get some Jack In The Box or something to eat, and I put on “Summer Breeze” by The Main Ingredient. I thought it was the original version of that song, but he was super quick to correct me;

“Nah, that's not the original. The original was Seals and Crofts. Look it up. You can pull it up on your phone? Look it up.”

Sure as shit...

I do regret not staying last night. By the same token, I don't think he would have wanted to drink, and that's how we would have ended the night... Honestly that probably would not have been a great 911 call. The last thing he would have wanted was for me to get arrested for elderly abuse. I don't think every police officer who shows up to that kind of situation is going to be sympathetic to behavior like that. But who knows.

Unlike with my Mom who went to a hospice facility, my Dad had in-home hospice care. The staff wasn't 24/7... We had been working toward being able to have a full-time caregiver, but we just couldn't make it happen in the time that he had left. That being said, the company we used is the only one that I've ever come across with a 5-star rating, and not a bad review anywhere that I could find. If anyone is interested, feel free to reach out to me privately and I'll be happy to provide their contact information.

I do know that he called the overnight line and a nurse did come out to check on him after I left around 8:00-8:30. I was told that the nurse was there around 11:00-11:30, the nurse probably would have stayed with him for at least a half hour. I don't think it was even 9am when his morning nurse came back to check on him and maybe a little after 9 when his nieghbor called me to let me know that he had passed. Based on what I've been able to piece together, the 3 hour playlist that he left started around 2:30am and continued until around 5:49am. That's when he played Afternoon Delight.

I know he knows that he was loved. Toward the end I had to erect some adult barriers between us to make sure I was handling my own shit, and still able to pay all of his bills at the same time. I also didn't approve of the fact that he let himself get so heavily addicted to opiates, so that may have complicated our relationship, but I don't think it ever soured it. If anything I think he enjoyed hearing about my wife and I spending time together. Or any of the mundane stuff that I had to share about my week. Even if it was only for an hour or two on Sundays, we still sat with each other. Sometimes we talked politics. Other times it was just a series of random thoughts that we would share with one another. I didn't always enjoy having to trek to the other side of town to bring him groceries, but it gave me a damn good reason to go see him at least. So as much as I didn't like it doing it sometimes, I'm going to miss not having to.

I originally wrote this in April of last year, shortly after my Mom's passing. This was something on the previous incarnation of my blog. I felt it was worthy of re-posting and preserving. Today would have been her 73rd birthday. When I think about her, I can still hear her laugh. Happy Birthday Mom!

My Mom's passing came quick. There's another post that I wrote but haven't published (yet, or ever)... It was written in the weeks leading up to her final moments, and it's pretty intense, and just a long rant. It was also completely devoid of the thought that she might not have much time left. We were under the impression that hospice would be able to sort our her medication and be able to place her in a nursing home. I just assumed that she would be around for a while and that her dementia would continue along a predictable path. It felt like we were close to getting her placed, somewhere she would have been looked after around the clock and taken care of. Not that my Dad wasn't caring for her, he was, and was doing a good job, but it was definitely wearing him down.

I think my Mom knew that she wasn't long for the this world, or maybe she just didn't want to be here any longer. She was talking about death on Valentine's Day. I drove my parents to my Father's doctor appointment because Dad was afraid to go to his appointment, he didn't think he could manage to watch Mom in the waiting room, and he knew that he wouldn't be able to just leave her at the house alone.

So there we were, in the parking lot of the doctor's office, Mom and I sat in my truck listening to a random selection of 60s and 70s tunes. She had moments of clarity her last few months, but they were far and few between. It was hard to know when to take her seriously and when the neurons hadn't quite fired right.

“I know it's going to happen, and soon.” (I'm not sure if that's exactly what she said, but it was definitely something along those lines.)

“What's going to happen, Mom?”

“Death.“ 

So... I put on Norman Greenbaum's Spirit in the Sky and said to her;

“Nah, you have plenty of time left.”

It was only about a month later—March 15th—that Mom went back into hospice care. I went and saw her that evening after work. She was definitely drugged up. The Andy Griffith Show was on the TV in her room, but she wasn't paying any attention to it... Although, that type of behavior wasn't new. I thought, “maybe the drugs they have her on would help her focus?” Though, even without all the drugs, my Father had said that she lost interest, or couldn't focus long enough to follow along to a half-hour sitcom. 

My Dad had to watch her pretty closely in the final months, she would have episodes like you would expect someone who has schizophrenia to experience; seeing and hearing things that weren't there, having full on conversations with people who didn't exist or weren't in the room with her, etc. So they had her on some serious anti-psychotic medication, among other things. I'm still not entirely sure what the full cocktail was. Any time there was a new medication, I would ask Dad, and he would always tell me the name and the dosage, and let me know that he looked it up online and read about it... But I don't remember what any of the drugs were. Seemed like she went through damn near fifty different pills and liquids the past couple of years. It was fine when it was only the lowest dose of Prozac, and she wasn't on anything else. But once the doctors started adding on to the laundry list of pharmaceuticals I admittedly disassociated a bit, and just let my Dad handle it.

The doctors tried to get my Dad to administer the recommended dosages, but he couldn't do it, because my Mom had never really taken drugs in the past, and she was a lightweight when she did—she could very easily fall asleep from a cup of camomile tea—her body just couldn't handle the necessary dosages of the medication they were giving her to control her mind. Both my Father and I know instinctively, that's exactly why she didn't make it. 

In just a short week she was gone. I shouldn't have been so busy with work and everything else. I should have spent more time with her that week. But I didn't. And by the time I did make it back there, it was too late.

On March 22nd I went back down to hospice... On the white board above her bed where the doctors and nurses mark their rounds, there was a section called “Today's Plan” and underneath it just read “Chaplain Joe.”

The nurses told me that she was unresponsive, I said, “I know.” But, I really didn't know what they meant by “unresponsive,” it was a nice way of putting it, I guess... I could go into details, but those details aren't really necessary. I balled my eyes out. I tried playing Spirit in the Sky again and I heard myself mutter, “a little over a month, she should remember us sitting in my truck, right?” She didn't have much of a reaction to the song. I tried playing some other songs by other artists too; Heart and Jim Croce, I was scrambling trying to find something that would wake her up for at least one more minute so I could tell her I loved her and that it was okay. The songs didn't work though. I've been telling myself that even though she didn't give a reaction, she could still hear it. Mom always had very acute hearing, even as she got older.  If nothing else it was better than the Henry Mancini bullshit they had playing in the room before I got there.

Skyler showed up. She stayed with me in the room with my Mom. I probably only gave it about ninety minutes before I realized that I wouldn't be able to stop crying, or be able to calm myself down, and Mom simply wasn't going to wake up. Her face didn't even look the same. The vessel was still hanging on to a whisp of her essence (or soul), but I could tell she was on her way out. Whatever was left inside was being hindered by a body and physical mind that wasn't functioning anywhere near within normal specifications, and that must have been incredibly frustrating.

Around 1 a.m. on the 23rd is when hospice called to inform both my Father and I that Mom had passed.  It was a bit of a slap in the face and a punch to the gut all at the same time.

“Well thank you for letting me know...”

“We can only keep the body for four hours, you have to have it off the premises as soon as possible, we don't have a way to preserve it. Which mortuary is it?”

The logistics and practicalities of death are not things that go through your head when in mourning, they're shocking and offensive things to hear, but I didn't react angrily, instead I heard myself meekly respond with something like;

“Uh, it's not a mortuary or a funeral home, it's one of those 'donate your body to science' places.”

“Do you know the name?”

“No, I'm sorry... I'll have to get the information and call you back... I know. Four hours.“ 

My eyes were beat red and bloodshot, and the inside of my nostrils were swollen from sobbing off an on all night, going on eight hours. I was trying my best to hold back the tears if only just to save myself from the discomfort of my entire face being utterly raw.

I feel terrible about the way that everything down, but I have started to realize that her condition had been progressing for six or seven years, and probably well before then. It's an abysmally slow decline. The threads of her memories were like the ends of a frayed sweater of her mind, with one string being pulled that was slowly unravelling the whole garment. I had been trying to stay optimistic and not let myself go through any of the emotions that I was feeling at the time, but the result from that at the culmination of her death meant several years of pent up and unwrought feelings that hit me like a ton of bricks. Sheer helplessness.

One of the things that my Father said has rung true, Mom hadn't been the Mom that we remembered for quite some time. Her condition snuck up on all of us, and before being able to do anything constructively proactive, it was too late, she had already started to descend. And I'm not really sure what we could have done. From what I understand, dementia isn't preventable once you're in your old age, because no one knows exactly what causes it, or rather, it isn't caused by anything specific. Doctors just have a broad range of recommendations; eat healthy, don't smoke, stay a healthy weight, get exercise, drink plenty of water, etc. It's not an honest recommendation, it's just a list of things we pretend keep people in good shape and alive longer than others. There are plenty of people out there who don't do those things; eat terrible and unhealthy foods, smoke excessively, abuse their bodies in more ways than one, no hobbies, they don't read, etc. And they live just as long if not longer than the people who do everything the doctors tell them to do.

This life is not guaranteed.

The hardest part was not really being able to say goodbye. It sounds so cliche, but it's true...

I love you, Mom. We miss you.