family

After an early and fast start to the day, Eliza May arrived. Well done Emma and Ben. Thank you Lord!

It’s been three years since Mum died. I received a phone call from the hospital at around 1:15pm during our office Christmas lunch. I stepped outside to take the call and was told by the attending Doctor that Mum had died of a cardiac arrest and that the hospital staff had honoured her request of not attempting resuscitation. She had been hospitalised leading up to a medical procedure but her slight frame was not up for it.

It’s five years today since my Dad died. Sometimes it seems like only a couple of years. On other occasions it feels like ten or more years. We’re living in the house that he and Mum lived in for close-on thirty years at the end of their lives. There are a few remnants around the house–the odd bit of furniture, some cutlery, a stack of slides and photos to continue to cull and distribute.

In the middle of the evening Heidi Abigail arrived. Well done Emma and Ben. All glory to God.

It’s three years to the day since my father died. Interestingly our society manages death by calling it something else. Years ago people ‘died’, more recently they are said to have ‘passed away’, but these days they just ‘passed’. Does denial make it easier? Perhaps in the short term; but giving it a different name may only prolong the grieving process. Even though it is three years since the actual day of my father’s death, he really began declining ten years earlier and a few years after he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.

My father, known to his grandchildren as “Poppop”, was known for his fairly quick and somewhat acerbic wit. He was also a pragmatist (wonder who inherited some of those characteristics!) An example of his somewhat unusual humour was when he bought a mobile phone at around age 80 and then proceeded to try to understand the instructions as they related to the phone in front of him. He annotated one page of the instructions with various questions as to “where?

We were informed this evening that at approximately 3:30 this afternoon our first grandchild, Micah Theodore, arrived. Well done Emma and Ben, and thank you Lord for the safe arrival.