Yooper Boyz in the woods back in the day
I don’t always remember the date of my old coot’s death on the date that it happened. His last couple of months were absolutely horrendous. A fall on ice, a shattered pelvis, a late-night air ambulance ride to the Henry Ford Hoosegow in downtown Dee-troit. Three weeks there, ALL OF THEM IN A HOSPITAL BED, 11 DAYS IN THE ICU, two looooonnnng surgeries, a ground ambulance ride back to a rehab facility in his beloved Sault Ste. Siberia, failure to thrive (my opinion and not an official diagnosis just in case there are perfectionists lurking out there wanting to correct me), sepsis, and death.
None of this was any fun at all but it was truly only the last couple months of his life that he suffered anything but the usual crapola that old age entails. I often think that he’d have been better off if his little heart arrhythmia had dropped him in his tracks but alas, that didn’t kill him. It had to be harder than that. Of course, that meant that it was easier (in some ways) for me, as his only living child. When your elderly parent is miserable and you know things aren’t going to get better, there is a certain sense of relief when they die. I know some of my nine readers understand that. The Commander (my mother and his wife) also felt that relief but we’ll go there some other day (or not) and I went through an even worse sort of thing with my mother and we won’t talk about the Stoopid Crapola that I endured after she died.
Let’s focus on the good times, when my old coot was a young 20-year-old engaging in all kinds of hi-jinks involving automotive vee-hickles and, um, implements of too much fun aka guns. I’ve posted the gunfighter photo before but it is a classic in our family and I have to post it again. And here are a few more. All of these photos are from the Sherman Archives, curated by my childhood friend Dan Sherman. Love. To Dan and the Fin and Sherman families and all of the Veteran Greenhorns. Love is all there is.
March 23rd, 2016 at 10:17 pm
They have such joie de vivre! It makes me happy looking at these photos. It is always sad when a loved one dies, but especially poignant if they have had to deal with losing who they are and what they can do. They can’t go on as they are, and yet we want to keep them close.