Our plans for the next couple months

As most readers of our blog already know, 19 days after Dianna's Dad passed away, her mother joined him. She fell and injured her back while getting ready for bed. Nothing was broken but she was in severe pain from a nasty bruise. The pain prevented her from breathing deeply or from coughing productively. Apparently this allowed an infection to slowly develop in her lungs and full blown pneumonia followed. She was just too frail to fight it off and passed away on October 24th. She was buried beside Dad on the 29th.

Of course, all the family gathered once again. It was much more difficult emotionally this time, but also a lot easier from a practical standpoint. We already knew who to contact and what to expect. Her service was almost a carbon copy of Dad's, and most of the same people attended. It was held in the church she attended for 83 years.

The biggest impact this time is that now we have a house to empty out and sell. Dianna and I had planned to stay in the area until Mother was settled in an assisted living center, so our focus just changed to going through the house, inventorying everything so we can decide who wants what, and moving forward with plans to distribute or sell everything. We spend 5 days a week in the house but return to our home, which is parked in Bakersfield, a couple days a week. The house went on the market today.

Obviously it is a tough time on everyone but time has a way of taking the edge off. We are focused on what we have to get done, but keep finding things that remind us of how much we will miss Dianna's parents. It gets easier as we go along, but easier is relative.

We plan to stay here until the middle of December when we will go to Texas to be with Dayna's family for Christmas. We have decided to buy Widener's car and we will drive it so we can license it there. We do not plan to take the trailer since we will only be there a short time, celebrating Christmas and keeping annual Dr. visits. The car is a 1999 Lexus GS300. It only has 52,000 miles on it, and Dianna and I have probably put the last 5,000 on it during the past few summers.

Greg's family will be here in early December and we hope to finalize what goes where by then. When we return after Christmas we will stay here until all the contents are distributed. Then we will move on to who knows where, and hopefully our life will again return to something approaching normal.

We both appreciate all the emails, phone calls, cards, flowers, food and prayers that have come our way from family and friends. They have helped us cope and provided much needed support.