Hi folks – I’m back after almost a year of SDMB sabbatical. I’ve been lurking for the past month or so and see the place has shrunk further and slowed down more while I was gone. That’s a shame. But many of my favorite key posters are still much in evidence; it seems the quality folks mostly stick around.
With luck my return will be viewed as a positive for our little society. Or should I call it a “club” now? Societies seem so much bigger.
In a nutshell, I left SDMB because I was getting addicted to blowing all day here, despite the dwindling fresh contents to be had and the increasing IRL issues I needed to attend to. I was happy with you all, but unhappy with the harm it was causing me. I’m hoping to be able to maintain a stable relationship with SDMB now because there simply isn’t enough daily content for me to become addicted to it to a detrimental degree vs. my now simpler but still busy (see below) real life.
And there was another reason I dropped off. A sorta-secret reason that, aside from a few vague allusions, I’ve almost entirely hidden from the SDMB public since I joined in 2003. Over time SDMB became a refuge for me - a slice of my day where, unburdened of my issue, I could be an ordinary person with an ordinary life for awhile. And I thank each of you for the parts you unknowingly played in delivering that normalcy into my life daily. It really does take a village.
Specifically: By the summer of 2021 when I started my sabbatical, my dear wife had been intermittently suffering from slowly advancing cancer for 25 of the 33 years we were married. She was then entering the final no-realistic-hope stage of her almost decade-long stint as a full-time cancer patient; a decade-long slide from middle-aged almost-normalcy into the equivalent of extreme elderly invalidity despite being then just 65 years old. She died in August 2021 after a period of first de facto then official hospice at home. I was there beside her for all the years and all the appointments and all the treatments and all the everything, both good and bad. Including the final rasping desperate breath. And you were all there to keep me sane through all that. Thank you.
She was my soulmate and I will miss her terribly for the rest of my life. Even in her late-stage depleted condition she was a woman of remarkable strength, wisdom, learning, and character; my best friend ever. We should all aspire to be as graceful and courageous under intense sustained fire as she was.
Since then in not quite 10 months I’ve …
Arranged her memorial, totaled my then-fairly new car (without injury or liability thank Og), bought another even better car, had my aged MIL (for whom I am responsible for administration and comfort, though not daily care as she lives in an independent living facility nearby) totally wig out over the death of her daughter and descend into raging paranoia that I intended to harm her and/or steal her savings, connected in a new and different role with a wonderful woman nearby who I’ve known for decades, closed out my late wife’s physical and then later legal estate, had that wonderful woman move in with me as my SO, been grounded at work after a preliminary diagnosis with a career-ending and probably significantly life-shortening medical condition myself, married my living-in SO, had MIL calm down and sheepishly apologize for her bout of paranoia, but also accelerate her slide into absent-minded but contented semi-senility, been admitted to a hospital for the first time in my life for emergency surgery (totally unrelated to the medical item above and turned out to be minor in scope even if emergently urgent and potentially much, much more severe in the extent of cutting and sewing needed), had the preliminary life-changing medical diagnosis vanish in a cloud of “Oops, we wuz wrong; you’re totally fine”, returned to normal work after appropriate refresher training, finished my term on my condo’s Board of Directors and relinquished all those responsibilities to 300+ people, been selected for jury duty on the latest phase of the infamous Parkland FL mass school shooting case, then after 96-2/3rds years of waking up alive every single previous morning MIL forgot once and instead woke up dead one day at the old ladies’ home (and thereby saved me from that jury duty; thanks Mom!), had my nearby niece / daughter-in-law who’s a wonderful foster Mom successfully adopt one of her charges, making childless me an instant grandfather-in-law-sorta of an adorable 2yo, completed MIL’s heirloom distribution and apartment closeout, got her estate/trust process going, had my wonderful new wife retire for good, had both of us catch a nasty 3-week not-COVID viral infection that we’re both now just getting over, and held MIL’s memorial w a bunch of extended family, one of whom we found out later unknowingly had COVID at the time. Oh yeah, promptly after all that just a few days ago the darling 2yo was hospitalized for most of a week w a non-COVID respiratory infection that briefly landed her in the pediatric ICU. She’s home now, and apparently none the worse for wear.
At least that’s all that’s happened to me up through noon today. I expect something else any minute now. So, if any of you had wondered why I’ve not had spare time to post … well … And now you know … the rest of the story. Good day.
A few weeks ago, I took one of those online questionnaires to determine your current life stress score. When I got done the site said “Please, sir, don’t try to troll our statistics; nobody ever has that much shit going on at once.” Or words to that effect. 
But everything I’ve just shared is true.
Through it all I’ve been by turns unhappy, wistful, dutiful, and joyful, but much, much more of the last than the others. My friends and family, both new and old, have been wonderful. My rebirth from the ashes of my first wife’s disease has been, by their description, nothing short of spectacular. Without meaning to brag, it sure feels that way from where I sit. Life is truly grand as the Sun shines brightly on springtime here in Florida and everywhere in LSLWorld.
My new wife and new life are everything that Fate obstructed in so many ways during my last life. She is different from my first wife in many, many ways, yet similar in many too. And absorbing all that change is not so easy at 63; not for her and not for me. But we knew that going in and we agree our mutual growth is totally worth it. We have social, we have travel, we have activities, we have fun, we have joy. On a daily basis, and in large measure. We have life, after a decade-plus spent increasingly merely dying by inches myself while helping my beloved first wife as she slowly died by ever-larger chunks.
Now the world just needs to not have Putin create WW-III, some combo of Putin, Xi, and COVID not destroy the Western economic / financial system, not have RW lunacy destroy the USA, not have global climate change destroy Florida and destabilize most of the coastal First and Third World, while also not having ill-considered climate change remediation feel-good measures crater my industry and the world economy. Oh yeah, and reverse the current freefall in the S&P so I can afford to eat after I’m forced to retire next year. Easy Peasy.
In short: “What, Me Worry?”
It’s good to be back. It’s good to be alive.
I may not be a daily poster, but I’ll be around regularly.
Cheers!
