Endings

This day took a sad, unexpected turn.

12 minutes before the end of my workday, my sister called me and asked me to come to her house. As in, right then. Given that she was midway through a course of chemotherapy, I was already calling my boss to say I was leaving.

As it turned out, the health crisis wasn’t her. It was her husband, who she discovered had stopped breathing.

G and I were in the car and out of the door in 10 minutes flat, taking time only to pee and change clothes. (I work from home and there are no zoom calls, so pants are not part of my work uniform.)  Unfortunately we live nearly two hours away. By the time we arrived, so had our youngest son and one of my nieces.

My brother-in-law was 52 years old. I won’t pretend he was my favorite person — far from it — but my sistrer adored him. We don’t know cause of death and may never know. Brother-in-law had a kidney transplant about four  years ago, and decided one near-death situation was inadequate. He followed it up with a nearly-killed-him motorcycle crash a couple of years later. I’m camped out next to my baby sister for at least the next few days. Unfortunately she can no longer drive. They didn’t have kids and weren’t on speaking terms with his family, so she doesn’t really have anyone else.

There’s considerably more involved, but everyone’s in too much shock to focus on anything but the immediate situation.