It's been winter since Christmas, inside and out. You know that gray, bored, cabin-fevered emotional void that comes with the post-holiday letdown? And I always feel like I'm being ungrateful to complain about anything because, really, I have nothing to complain about. My life has been richly blessed and I never really forget that. I'm very grateful. But this is a feeling, a feeling that passes through me often. I don't know if its a chemical thing or a lack-of-sun thing but I get blue and this is certainly the time of year I feel I struggle with it the most. But for a very different reason, this has been a difficult last few months for me.

If you have read any of my posts in the last 9 months or so, you know I lost my father to cancer last May. Besides the usual grief that brings, its just weird to suddenly know at my age that one of my parents is no longer on this earth. Move ahead 8 months. I had an uncle that suffered many, many mini strokes the past 3-5 years. The past 3 years have been spent in in-home care and not always being terribly aware of who people are or what's going on around him. But he remained a large man and was a burden that my aunt and cousins dealt with mostly on their own all that time. It was an existence that certainly seemed to have no quality of life, not an existence that anyone would consider beneficial. But he had the stubborness and tenacity to hang on nearly 3 years longer than anyone, including his doctors, expected. But he took a sudden turn last month and in a week's time, he suddenly was gone. As with my father's cancerous decline, no one could be terribly sad that their suffering was over.

Skip ahead one more time one month later. Yesterday.