Blog 3493 – 05.27.2025
Preparing for the Inevitable
Most Tuesdays since November sixth this past year, I have been trying to prepare for the inevitable. My loving and lovely wife, Linda Lee, for the past three and a half years has been suffering an obvious mental, emotional, and physical decline. It is a painful process watching those we love leave us under any circumstances and when that happens slowly it is no less stressful for them and us.
Almost twenty-five years ago my beloved mama took her own life. Dad had died of a heart attack attack or stroke three years before and mom’s long bout with depression and insomnia had only worsened since dad was no longer there to be the foil, the fall guy. I recall from a small boy that my mother blamed her unhappiness on my father as if it were his responsibility to make her happy. I grew up thinking it was mine as well. Some years ago I came to see that it is a terrible and impossible burden to lay upon anyone, grown-up or child. It is silly notion that we can make anyone happy but ourselves, or thinking that our own happiness it is anyone’s responsibility but our own.
We cannot no matter how hard we try make anyone else happy nor expect anyone to may us happy but ourselves. I have said that now three times in a row in only slightly different ways. If I were a teacher and you were my student you might expect this to be on the exam. Over my academic career I learned early on that the best way to study for exams was to listen carefully in class and to especially take note of anything that the professor or teacher said more than once.
Back to my beginning remarks, I wrote that I have been preparing for the inevitable. For sometime I have accepted the very real possibility that I will survive my wife. We both had wills and durable powers of attorney drawn up almost five years ago preparing for the likelihood that one of us would out live the other and making our wishes in the matter a matter of public record.
We had hoped to travel around the country and even to Paris together when I retired in December of 2021. Alas, that was not to be for Linda suffered a behavioral episode after a terrible bout with Shingles in early February three years ago and has never been the same. Our trip to Paris Fund will most likely never be used for that and we have made not trips further that a few hours from home since February 2022.
On the mostly Tuesday since securing the first of two pieces of property adjacent to sixty acres that our son Jay owns near Bon Weir, Texas, I have been preparing a camper trailer site on the thirty one acres that are in my name. The spot is cleared and the electric and water connections are already in place. I even sowed grass seed last week on the site.
Hopefully, in a few weeks the twenty foot pull behind RV Camper trailer that I purchased from a friend in Indiana will arrive and we will have all the comforts of home there. I hope Linda will be up for trips to visit what I have lovely come to think of as Jay’s Hundred Acre Wood.
They are calling for rain there today and most of this week so I have opted to skip my weekly visit. There is not much else I can do there till the trailer arrives anyway.
I was only a Boy Scout for one year when I was eleven years old, but I learned a lot of woodcraft and to feel quite at home in the woods. I also learned as a Boy Scout that it is important to “Be Prepared.”
Someday in the not too distant future I expect to have to say goodbye to my beloved wife of almost thirty-six years. Linda as a girl love to walk in the woods on her daddy’s farm. She and I have had many wonderful walks in the woods together in more than a few different states over the years. We have yet to walk Jay’s Hundred Acre Wood together. I hope that is still a possibility and that we get to spend time in our little house on wheels in the wild woods together.
Your friend and fellow traveler.
David White
Home To Stay
theencouragingword 