Notes From A Broken Heart

Jim, my fearless friend, died recently. Others of his legion of friends will note that he "transitioned," and some will remark that he "passed away." Not to quibble! However, since my younger daughter Courtney's death, I've embraced "death and dying" as terms emblematic of permanent-not-coming-back-this-way-again-loss. This distinction does nothing to ease the heart-wrenching, mind-boggling emptiness I still feel five years later.  I expect nothing ever will. Jim died, not suddenly at all; he'd been under hospice care for little more than a week; his two daughters and son holding vigil yet dreading its ending.  The "old folks" would say, "He just slept away," leaving jaundiced earth behind.  His contemporaries would opine, "he just went on Home" to a promised Glory, through the door God had dispatched his angel to open. When my dad died a decade ago, the nurse who met us at the elevator eulogized him as "A gra

(I haven't blogged in almost two months, having spent half of that time in Chicago.  Here's part of the "why").     "Chicago, Chicago, that toddling town.  Chicago, Chicago, I will show you around.  Bet your bottom dollar you'll lose the blues in Chicago, Chicago; the town that Billy Sunday couldn't shut down," or so Frank Sinatra sang back in the day.  (Billy Sunday?) I spent half my sojourn as a Don Quixotic sidekick to my candidate-niece, Judie, in her quest to win a  judgeship in a hotly contested race.  Let me explain: all my nieces and nephews (and there's a slew of them) rank as "favorite,"  but that designation had nothing to do with my decision to spend almost a month in Chi-Town. More than likely,  the reality of my sister and her daughter living on different floors in a lakefront high-rise, persuaded me. I've opined previously about the Siren allure of Lake Michigan! It harbors a personality that changes like a chameleon,