Hi friends, I know it is Saturday, but sometimes I just have something more to say. You may more may not be familiar with this song, But, to sum it up, a man ends up drinking himself to death over his pain of a broken relationship. And the woman cannot live with the guilt, so she drinks herself to death as well.

Last night, my wife’s uncle passed away from complications due to diabetes. Out of respect for him, I am not going to mention his full name. But, this is my forum so I am going write about my feelings and perspective. I think that was his own whiskey lullaby. It wasn’t the relationship that caused the drinking, it was the drinking that ended the relationship. But, ultimately when he lost everything it was too late stop the damage.

I feel bad for him, the baby of twelve. He wasn’t too much older than me, I would say fifteen years or so. In some ways a distant older brother rather than an uncle. You almost can’t help it with age gap as my wife and he grew up together, and that took a long time.

I would say he was about forty when he married and assumed a family. He seemed happy and changed from couch surfing and staying up all night drinking to buying a small property and raising animals, a stepson and a life I never knew he had in him. I suppose that the forties are an age where cracks start to appear from the habits acquired in life. My father-in-law was diagnosed with diabetes in his mid-forties, my wife’s other uncle that drank himself to death in his mid-fifties had diabetes for a number of years.

I guess what I am saying is that everything seems fine until it isn’t. At that point, you have two choices: straighten up or continue the way things are. Like all addictions, it is really hard to change. I don’t know if he was really an alcoholic or someone that just couldn’t imagine life differently. We knew that the doctors advised him to stop, we also knew that he didn’t. I suppose that it is one of those things that you think there is still time.

I can’t help but think that if he had a couple more spankings as a child and a few less turned heads as an adult that this wouldn’t have been the end. He was a good guy with a few faults. If he was an alcoholic, he made it to work every day was always helpful setting up and cleaning up family functions no matter how much he had drank. Maybe that is what you call functional?

Once his wife had enough, it went downhill fast. The house went up for sale, in fact he was in the hospital when the property closure happened and we had to help move his stuff out. I don’t know for a fact but I assume that the pain was too much because he was in and out of the hospital all summer. Then we got the call yesterday that if we wanted to say goodbye, we had better hurry.

End Your Programming Routine: I suppose that we all have people in our lives that are headed to a crash course to reality. I am sad that this is how the story was written. I really don’t know what else to say but R.I.P – Jim. I hope that you have now have the peace that this life did not bring… “and the angels sing a whiskey lullaby”.