Life is Never a Done Deal

Embarrassingly, I admit it has been fifteen months since my last post. I had been doing some record keeping in a journal style app and also became busier with the transitions that were occurring in my life.

Since my last post I have had more life changes than I care to list. Some of my own making, others I was at the mercy of. I retired from my job of twenty eight years in April 2015. Some training I received there set me up for my next job in May of 2015. I took a three day weekend after I retired and started the new job the following Monday. Life cruised along quite nicely for three months until my father in law passed away. The home we were living in was owned by him. We had previously lived in another house owned by him in another city in the Bay Area. We seized upon an opportunity to move a year earlier when my sister in law and her husband bought a house on the other side of town in their smallish, somewhat rural community. We moved from the urban sprawl to a quiet street in that small town that was far enough from the city to feel small but close enough to make the trip if necessary. Our son remained at the house in the city and was able to get a couple of roommates so he could afford the rent.

After my father in laws passing, the sister in laws decided to sell those two houses I just mentioned. As this was just beginning to proceed, I nearly lost my wife to a triple brain hemorrhage. She was in a coma in the hospital as the sale plans on the houses continued. I ended up quitting my new job to care for her. With the exception of one Saturday afternoon when my pastor and two others came to help me move the heavy items out of the house and into the PODS storage containers I had rented and a few days where my brother was in town, I had to move out of our house by myself.

As I mentioned, I quit the new job to care for my wife. While she was in good hands during her forty six days in the hospital, she needed and advocate because she was unable to communicate for the majority of that time. It wasn't until just a couple of weeks before she was transferred to a rehabilitation facility that she was able to converse in any significant fashion.

[fast forward three years]

The beginning of this post was written shortly after my wife's strokes. It's now three years later in May of 2019. We bought a home outside of Cincinnati, Ohio about half an hour from our daughter and the grandsons. It's in an amazing neighborhood that we couldn't touch if it was in California. Our neighbors are awesome and my commute is less than ten minutes. At this moment, life is good and we've been incredibly blessed by God to have had truly miraculous recovery from strokes.