That's A Shock...

I had those weird, premonition-style feelings last night when I heard the words "resting comfortably" regarding Queen Elizabeth II.  I'm no genius, but my gut said "assuming she'd been resting comfortably many of her 96 years worth of nights, why is this one different?  UH OH."  

Then the news earlier today was ... well, I get it.  As a child, if you are fortunate like I was, your parents are indestructible.  Sure, the rest of the world falls apart, but Mom and Dad are just there.  Anchors of your life, as it were.  And then, as you get older, you realize they're just plain old regular human beings, like we all are.  

When my father went into the hospital for the final time, I noted it was another holiday he'd spend in the hospital.  I mean, growing up, my father managed to land in the hospital for the weirdest things many holidays.  There was the Memorial Day stay when he got some sort of infection from a tick bite.  There was the massive heart attack on the 4th of July 1980.  There was the other visits - Easter, Halloween, New Year's, I don't recall him being in the hospital over Christmas, but a lot of other special days were marked by Dad and hospital.

And because I was somewhat hardened to it, when I was at Scout Camp and informed Dad had been hospitalized, but things were getting better, I figured no worries, I can stop by on the way home or ... well, it was the year my daughter decided she wanted to be a Counselor In Training at that Scout Camp.  So we all went up the weekend before the 4th of July, I stayed with the Troop and my son, my wife stayed with my daughter in the cabin over in Family Camp.  That Saturday, my wife came and picked me and my son up from camp, we helped her load up the stuff from her cabin, then load my daughter's stuff over to her Staff Tent.  We took her into town to pick up a few items she felt necessary, we took her back to camp, then drove the 5 1/2 hours back home.  We got home after midnight.  I checked in with the family the next day, and things were looking OK.  I went about my business until that Wednesday, when I got the call.  

"Dad's gone."  Wait, what?  You couldn't let me know things were looking down?  Then again, that's not typically how it goes for my loved ones.  My grandmother - Dad's mom - was getting ready to come home from the hospital when she died.  My grandfather was in a nursing home, we'd seen him the Sunday before he died.  My father in law was not in any sort of distress, he was improving, when my wife got the call six weeks after we'd seen him at our wedding.  My wife's grandmother was at the hospital, dressed, waiting for the nurse to come in with the wheel chair to wheel her out to the door where one of her daughters would bring the car to take her back home, when she passed away.  My mother in law was in the nursing home, doing well, we'd seen her about three weeks prior, nurses were in the room working with the other woman when my mother in law mentioned her leg hurt - and then just stopped breathing.  The nurse who called my wife was crying.  

So at least in my experience, the few hours I had of warning before my mother passed away don't often come.  But I suppose when you're one of the folks who are fairly well known around the world, you do tend to have better health care than some, and a lot more monitoring.  So I'm sure it was something of a mixed blessing for the family to be able to be there.  But at the same time, you grasp for straws at times like that.

I'm sure that I know about 5% of what Charles feels right now.  For the first time in his 73 years, he's going to wake up and know his mother isn't around.  I spent about 10 years thinking "I should ask Dad about ..."  and remembering that the font of such a wide range of knowledge was gone.  Charles had his mother about twenty more years than I did, so there is that.  And I didn't get a new job when Mom passed away.  Well, it took a few years, but I didn't get one handed to me.  Let alone one that comes with the sort of visibility that has people all around the world wondering what I'm up to any given day.  Or asking me to come visit their school, church, village, or what ever it is they want you to see.  

I know there are some folks in Britain who aren't sorry she's gone.  I still look at it as you lost a mother, grandmother, or great grandmother, and that's going to affect the entire extended family.  In her case, it's a bit bigger, but it's also a tremendous amount of personal history, personal experience, and the broad perspective she had as a girl living through the Blitz in World War II, a mechanic who knew how to care for military motor vehicles, a woman who had seen so much of the world and of life and was obviously enjoying just about every day.  

She did live up to the promise that she would serve her nation.  Yeah, she had the benefit of some really very nice places to live and visit, but when you spend your year visiting two or three events a day, sometimes even more, most of your days, that's a heck of a lot of stress.  And I'm an introvert.  I cannot even begin to imagine what sort of hell that is for someone who, from childhood, has been trained to be "out there" on the stage in front of the entire world.  If there's another level of hell, I'm sure I don't want to know what that is.  Probably the same, but you do it all day every day nearly naked.  

So I guess for me the bottom line is that I've been blessed to see history made by someone who was truly gifted.  Now, her successor, if he manages to do her job half as long as she did, will be 108 when he hits his 35th year on the Throne.  

So I do wish to extend my deepest sympathy and condolences to those of the British Commonwealth who are grieving.  I get it.  I was surprisingly choked up watching the coverage.  That's not someone I'd wish on anyone, let alone having to go through it while having thousands of cameras in my face.  Well-trained stiff upper lip or not, it's still a painful experience.  It takes your core out of you.  You find out what it is you're made of when your parents die.  I had decided many years before that when I became a parent, I'd correct some of the mistakes I felt my parents had made.  I tell my kids constantly that I love them, I let them know I'm very proud of the people they've become, proud of the choices they've made, and I let them know they have my deepest respect for what they've made for themselves.  And I'm sure the Queen let her kids know.  She very obviously was pretty proud of them, and pretty unhappy when they did dumb things.  But that's the way it goes in the best of families.  

Now we get to see how it all changes.