R is for Real Life

As happens all too frequently, real life has interrupted the game today. Please bear with me and I'll return (hopefully tomorrow) with some new content.

I'm simply not up to it today. It's been a long month and I've reached a breaking point. My imagination is simply not working today.

One month ago, we received a call at 2:30 a.m. this morning that my wife's mother was fading fast. She'd spent the last month in a rehab center after falling and breaking her hip (and undergoing her second hip replacement in three years). My wife rushed to her side and held her hand for the next four hours until she passed.
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About an hour later I received a telephone call from my mother telling me that my father had been hospitalized after an outpatient procedure to drain fluid from his lung resulted in that lung deflating.

Three additional deflations later and he's still in the hospital. Granted, he's on the rehab floor, but he's not doing all that great. Add to that the toll it's taking on my mother physically, mentally, and emotionally.... Yeah. The family is worried. My older brother is calling me every other day asking me "What are we going to do with Dad?" and "What do we need to plan for?"

Heck, we don't even know what he's going to need; let's not jump the gun.

We've met with social workers, we've met with nurses, we've met with administrators, we've met with therapists. We've had insurance coverage scares and health scares. We've had misdiagnoses.

Sometimes it's almost easy to see how someone could want to completely retreat into a world of dwarves and elves, dragons and unicorns; a world where life and death is decided by the roll of a 20-sided die, and where the same life and death decision can be reversed by another die roll and a pencil eraser applied liberally to a character sheet.

Sometimes, yes. But that's not reality. Reality sucks, but it's what we have to live with.

It's a good solution to the daily grind, the frustrations of the office and an escape from family squabbles. A good one, but a temporary one at best.

So, today I take for myself and for my wife and kids, to be there completely for them. Tomorrow, I hope to pick up the 20-sided die in one hand and my pen in my other and get back to fantasy.