Happy birthday G. I wish I could tease you about being the same age as the old speed limit and sing a Sammy Hagar song about driving to you today.

Wherever you are, I hope there are flat screen TV’s, ballons, champagne, funny hats and people who love you as much as we do here.

XOXO

Today we would have been married 5 years. You have been dead for 2 years and 9 months. You died 2 years and 3 months after our “first” wedding (the link explains all). You have been dead longer than we were married. Thank luck or karma or whoever is in charge that we had each other for many years before we were husband and wife, though that was not nearly enough. Going on three years since I last saw you still sucks, is still heart wrenchingly awful. Still. It gets better, but it will never be gone. It’s the last thing that ties me to you. Those moments alone in the hospital, before you were really gone forever.

It’s just a day on the calendar, but for a little while at least, it was our day.

If I told you that every time the phone rings around here I automatically think “Who died now?”  you’d think I was crazy, wouldn’t you?

I better start getting my check in the mail pretty soon because this morning, it happened. Again.

Now, let me back up a bit and get off my melodramatic soapbox and say that every single call isn’t about death or dying or cancer. Oh no, last week we got a call for my Dad. Who’s been dead two years. The week before that, someone called here looking for my dead husband’s ex-wife. Apparently, that crafty bitch is still hiding from her creditors. And so far this week, Brookwood hospital hasn’t called looking for my husband, who apparently they missed lying dead in their ICU.I also made plans on it to take my cousin to chemo and to deliver another copy of my husband’s death certificate to my attorney. Good times. I also blame the devil landline for the combination ear infection/sinus crap I am battling today. That’s gotta be it, right?

It just seems that out of the few good phone calls the old landline gets, it gets the demon spawn of bad ones. And yes, we still have a landline phone. That plugs into the wall and everything. It’s our last connection to the outside world here in the wilderness, cause when the power goes out that’s what I use to call my nearest Hilton and secure me a room. Girl gotta have her TV.

So this morning, the phone rings at 7:45 am. This is usually either my drug addled cousin or other bad news. Often it’s impossible to separate the two.

Today it was a good family friend, passing on the news of another friend’s passing earlier this morning. From cancer. (Insert string of expletives here)

Another person in our lives gone. We laughed at the memory of his frantic dancing banana act at a wedding reception, we cried because he died too young. And the phone will ring again soon, with news of the funeral we’ll attend, saying goodbye to another.

Godspeed Mickey.