A Tough Weekend...

We were out of school Friday and Monday for the Memorial Day holiday. I went shopping Friday, and got home around 1:00 p.m. The phone rang just after I got in, and when I checked the Caller ID, I saw the name of one of my favorite cousins. I had planned to call him, since I'd heard from a friend at school that my cousin's wife was in the hospital and quite ill. My cousin was wonderful while DH was in the hospital; came to see him almost every day, and stood with his arm around me when we were making the decision to let DH go. Anyway, I picked up the phone and said his name...but the voice on the line identified himself as my cousin's brother. My heart fell, because I knew what he was calling to tell me.

My cousin's wife passed away Friday morning around 7:30. She was 65 years old, and had been sick for twenty years or so. She had scleroderma, and by the time she went into the hospital this last time, she was unable to eat solid food and weighed around seventy pounds. She and my cousin had been married for forty-two years. They had one son; he died from a brain aneurism when he was eight years old.

My cousin was probably my mother's favorite nephew. My mother was thirty-four years old when she married my dad, and had lived with her parents until she married. My cousin would come to his grandparents' house and my mother would take him to the movies, and he'd spend the night and be treated as a king. When my dad died, he came to the house to see Mother, and told her that he had "forgiven" my dad for marrying her and taking her away from him; Mother got a good laugh out of that. When my nephew arrived at the house (he and Mother had a special relationship, too), he introduced himself to my cousin as "the competition", which made Mother laugh again at a difficult time.

The visitation was Sunday evening, and the funeral was Monday morning. I went to the visitation with my sister, but I drove to the funeral alone. I got there too late to sit with the family, and I did that on purpose. I don't think I could have handled sitting in the same seats where we sat for DH's service. I sat in a place in the chapel where my cousin could see me if he looked at the congregation...if he could see through his tears.

My birthday was yesterday. We're not usually in school on my birthday, but we have a really awkward calendar this year, so eighth grade graduation was yesterday. On Thursday afternoon before we got out for the long weekend, someone put up a floor-to-ceiling sign outside my classroom door announcing that it was my birthday and included a remark about my advanced age (54). I first blamed/gave the credit to a man who teaches with me (I taught him when he was in the eighth grade), who teases me a lot about my age (he'll send eighth graders to my room to ask about Lincoln's assassination...). However, after I thought about it, I think it was two other close friends who made it SEEM that someone else did it. It made my first birthday without DH a little easier, and I love them all for caring about me.