Whata ya gonna do? Sit around and cry in your beer? Go ahead. Drink yourself numb. Eventually, for a little while, you’ll sober up. It is what it is. OK. It’s cliché. But truth usually becomes cliché.

I tell people that my life is “Every day is Saturday, and every Saturday is a holiday.” You wish you were me. I wish you were me.

What the hell do I have to complain about? I have an incredible family…from my sons to my extended relatives. I’m living the “life of Riley” (Yeah, I’m old. If you know what that means, you’re old, too).

Fair? What’s fair about it? At the beginning of 2013 my father died. A week later, my wife died after five months of hell. That August, my mother died…three weeks or more after my brothers and I decided she’d rather starve to death than live inside her shell and told the doctors to take out her feeding tube.

Yeah. Life’s a bitch and then you die.

Thing is, I decided about a year ago that I wasn’t going to follow Jack Daniel’s into a six-by-three hole. Oh, I was in the hole, I just hadn’t started pulling the dirt over myself yet.

So…I have some good friends. I have a couple of brothers who were there. Sons. Grandkids. Someone told me I still had work to do. Work? Not anymore. Helping others? Yeah. I can do that, in a way.

I just wasn’t sure where to start.

Then I met an amazing person. In one long conversation we discovered that we had been shadowing one another for years. We were quick to accept one another’s flaws and the many, many hurts we’d had to overcome. In a few short weeks, we had unlocked so many chains, opened so many doors for one another that we could (did, sometimes) finish one another’s sentences. “Get outta my head!” was a laughable response.

We plan to live forever. Why not? Do you plan to die tomorrow?

Too many places to go, people to see, things to do. Gotta watch those grandkids become the incredible people they promise to be.

Life is not good. It’s unbelievably amazing.

You wish you were me.

I wish you were the you that you should be.

The only injustice is giving up.

Daniel J. Cox
05-07-2015