Alumni News

Photo by BobbaLew.

I miss her dearly.

Today is Tuesday, July 17, 2012.
It’s been three months since my wife died, April 17, 2012, also a Tuesday.
Here I am blogging my wife’s death again.
I can’t help it.
I’m devastated and heartbroken.
Some people want me to get over it, but I can’t.
We were married 44 years. She was the center of my life.
She covered for me when I had my stroke, and covered for me ever since.
I returned this with the rise of her cancer woes.
I became her taxi-driver for medical appointments into Rochester.
She felt she couldn’t meet the challenge.
There were a few Rochester appointments she could do, but her appointments were mostly me.
Especially Strong Hospital, a zoo.
I could do it, so I did.
They didn’t bother me in the least.
I wanted to keep her going.
But the cancer triumphed. We ran out of treatment options.
No more medical appointments, but I miss her dearly.
A month or two ago I informed our college, Houghton College, where we met, my wife had died, Class of ’66.
My intent was to see this announced in the Alumni News.
Yesterday, Monday July 16, my most recent Alumni News arrived, and she wasn’t in there.
I’m not surprised.
Just about every entry in the Alumni News is the death of someone, but we didn’t reflect favorably on the college.
We never had any books published, and we don’t have the financial wherewithal to fund a building.
In fact, they have me as having earned a Doctoral degree, which I won’t explain, except to say it was related to a fund-raising effort.
Houghton is a religious school, except the God they seem to worship is the Almighty Dollar.
And I (we) had the awful temerity and unmitigated gall and horrific audacity to notice this.
So therefore my wife’s passing is not announced, although I think perhaps other factors contributed to this slight.
Like my message was left voicemail.
But anybody and everybody seemed worthy of mention.
Where’s my wife? She certainly was important to me.
But apparently not to the college.
I won’t make an issue of it.
This is almost as bad as the Facebook bit.
Both my wife and my sister, who died last December, still have their Facebooks.
And Facebook refuses to pull the plug without a Death Certificate.
They can just stuff it! They ain’t gettin’ no Death Certificate.
Go cry in your bazilyuns, Suckerberg.

• I had a stroke October 26, 1993, from which I pretty much recovered.