It's done...

Life in his earthly body as well as the ceremony of burial, are over for Joey. The wake, the funeral, the interment…all done with. Now, for Karen and the kids, begins the time of “the firsts”. You know what I mean… the first Halloween without him, the first Thanksgiving, the first Christmas, the first New Years…so many firsts to get through. My heart breaks for Joey’s young family. I know they’ll be okay, really I do know it. But there will be many, many hard moments ahead and there’s nothing any of us, least of all me, can do to help them get past those. My memories of Joey and Karen’s memories of Joey are completely different and separate. She knows Joey as a man. Almost all of my memories are of Joey as a boy. As I’ve said before, our family kind of went their separate ways. This happened just about the time Joey became a man. I can count on one hand the number of times I've seen him in almost two decades. I saw him at Grandma’s funeral back in 1998 and I saw him last year when I was visiting his mom (my Aunt Ginger). Joey, Karen and the boys came over to Aunt Ginger’s and we sat around on the porch for awhile then went to dinner. That night was a lot of fun for me (although I seem to remember that I drank one too many margaritas. I also seem to recall that Joey, who had a drink or two himself, was encouraging my liquor consumption – he always was a funny guy. Worse than that, he always was a funny guy who didn’t mind watching his cousin make an ass out of herself – which I have a tendency to do with those darn margaritas in my system). Anyway, I can’t even share with Karen moments of “remember when?” about Joey because she and I don’t have the same memories of Joey. I wasn’t around the last 18 years of Joey’s life. I moved away and, the family situation being what it was, I opted not to pursue relationships with my family members. I think Joey may have done the same thing. Actually, I think just about all of us stopped being family because it became too damn complicated. And because we stopped being involved in each other’s lives, I missed out on Joey’s family, his children, his wife…I missed it all. I’m somewhat shocked at the depth of my grief now. I feel like a fraud for shedding tears. I have no right to be this sad over Joey’s passing. I didn’t keep up with him in life, how dare I mourn him this fervently in death. I guess my grief is magnified by knowing how much time I wasted, how many moments I let slip away, how little effort I put into loving my family. That guilt, that shame, that melancholy is a terrible thing to bear, let me tell you. I’m sorry beyond words that I wasn’t a part of Joey’s adult life. There was always going to be time, or so I thought. But let’s face it. We aren’t born with an expiration date stamped on our butts. You just don’t know when your time, or that of your loved one, is up. So, unless you just like living with regret, I say you should make the most of the time you have NOW. It may be the only time you’ll get.