When my younger daughter was in middle school, I once showed up to her basketball game with a large box of mini powdered sugar donuts. I shared them with the team, even though I wasn't on the hook for snacks. I called them "victory donuts." It was one of those silly moments that lives far longer in family lore than it has any right to. Today, after CU led the Texas A&M Aggies (ranked 5th in the country going into this game) until the last 2 minutes and 41 seconds, after which they proceeded to lose, I went over to the same daughter's house with a box of gluten-free powdered sugar donuts, and asked whether anyone wanted a pyrrhic victory donut. I probably wasn't using the phrase exactly right, but at that point I didn't care. At least Valerie joined me as I was eating my feelings. No one else did.
I went grocery shopping on the way to hanging out with the kids. I made French onion soup at their place, and we watched Soul (Pixar movie). They had been trying to nudge us into watching it for months now, and we finally got around to it. That is a pretty special one. It has several really deep messages mixed in with some damned fine animation. I swear, I have never seen cat fur rendered so beautifully. And for the record, I've also never seen Valerie as focused on the TV as she was watching the cat in the middle of that film. She loved it.
I've been trying to decide when to open up about who it was whose death threw us all for a loop earlier in the week. I think I'm ready to say who it was. Remember five years ago, when Mr S-P moved out for several months, and I was absolutely not ready to live on my own, having only just started coming to terms with my lupus diagnosis? That summer I rented out the basement to a lifelong friend of my son-in-law. He was a troubled soul who had had a great deal of difficulty with sobriety. He was trying to straighten up while he was here, but he went through some manic phases that made it hard. He and I got along well at first, but we agreed that he ought to move out about three weeks before Mr S-P asked to move back in "on a temporary basis." The young man bought our old pickup truck to move himself back to New Mexico, and wrecked it before he hit the state line. A couple years later, he called me out of the blue, to say he was turning his life around, and he apologized for the things he put me through. That was the last I heard from him, and I wanted to believe that he could stay on that positive trajectory. I was unsure of his chances for success, though. This week I learned through my son-in-law that he died about two weeks ago. He was only around 30 years old (I'm not sure exactly). The circumstances are not clear to us. We have heard rumors that didn't come from his family, and I will not give them air time here. It's not worth repeating. What we appear to be learning is how hard it is to be estranged from someone who seemingly had such great potential, who inspired complex emotions, with whom you suddenly can never find common ground again. It all feels incomplete, even for me, who knew him less than a year. I hope somehow his restless spirit is at peace now.
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