I had every intention of writing a fun, “Happy Friday” sort of post last week, but life had other ideas.

One of BFam’s four sisters graduated from college over the weekend. Her University was in Cincinnati which required BFam to take a five hour road trip to one of the most Southern points of our fair state. We are the owners of two buckets - a minivan and a sedan. I call them buckets, but they are just old and used. Far from buckets, but definitely not something you want to put on the road for ten hours. Understandably, a rental car was in order. BFam packed his things, bid farewell to his family, and promised to return by Saturday night, Sunday morning at the latest. If anyone out there comes from a large family, you know grouped plans tend to fall through as no one is prepared, packed, civil, sane, courteous or - in some cases - sober. I didn’t expect to see him until Sunday night.

I don’t think he’d been gone more than a few hours before my grandmother’s nursing home facility called to report she’d had a seizure. My grandmother has had her share of illnesses in old age. Seizures has not been one of them. Fast forward through a stay in Intensive Care and swarms of tests and we arrived at a diagnosis - the advancement of Alzheimer’s and her body’s reaction to it. We’ve gone through strokes, Dementia and diverticulitis to get to this point, so no one was surprised that Alzheimer’s was advancing. HOW it was advancing, well…

Saturday morning, I had planned to wake my children and get them ready for a typical Saturday afternoon ritual my mother and I began over a month ago - a lunch date. It would take me all of five hours to ready two children alone, and I’d set my alarm for just this reason. Three hours into bathing, dressing, hair combing and teeth brushing, our neighbor furiously beat our front door in. “Um… I think you need to come out here. Something has happened to your car.” What remained of the inside of my minivan was the shell of a dashboard where my husband’s semi-expensive car radio used to be. Gutted. The entire frame hung by multi-colored wires. My rear seats, where the children watched movies on their DVD player, void with the exception of one monitor. The passenger window hung outward being held only by what remained of its seal. We had been robbed. Again.

“Again, you say?”

Yes, I say. Again. Last year, almost a month to the moment, same car, different item - my digital camera. I’d made the mistake of having it drop out of my purse and onto the car floor. With the exception of a few CDs, it was the only item stolen. Our city police had me file a report - in both instances - but neglected to collect any evidence (fingerprints, DNA samples, etc.). Meanwhile, BFam, in Cincinnati, extremely angered, wants nothing more than to put a bullet between the eyes of the next offender. I want no part of that bullet. That thought. That neighborhood.

With my grandmother’s illness, it has given me pause to reflect on her life. I only know as much about her as she allowed since she was a very closely guarded person. But I know enough to determine she would not have wanted her life to end this way. While there may not be much she can do about it, it is our job, as her family, to remember things for her. Good and bad. I don’t know of anyone who would want to forget their life leading into death, but I don’t know of anyone who would want to see their death coming. Maybe things worked like this for a reason, I don’t know. What I do know is that God gives everyone what they need and it may not be in such a way that you asked or expected.

My grandmother, for years, has said she wanted to “go” before everyone. Before my grandfather, before her children, before me. My grandfather died six years ago. My grandmother started dying before then. The moment her memory began to go, she began to die. The person that everyone can see now, we are realizing, is not her.

And now BFam and I, for years, have been trying to figure out how we were going to move, knowing full well we needed to. In our minds, there was always something - we didn’t have enough money, Mooter was in private school, and before that, Mooter was in preschool. I always wanted something to happen to give us just the push we needed. My mistake was I wasn’t specific in what I wanted that “something” to be.

I think we all received clarity this weekend.