This doesn’t cover anything with technology or networking, so if you want, pass this up for the next posts. I am writing this as a tribute to my fiance’s grandfather who has just passed away. She will most likely never read this, but if she does, I hope it helps her with what I can’t.

She above all of her family members, short of her grandmother gave herself entirely to help take care of him and make sure he was comfortable in his final days. The eternal question was asked many times, when would he go and why is he left in so much pain? According to her, there is a plan for everyone, set before we’re born. If this is the case, then he had things left to witness or accomplish before he was taken.

I regret not knowing him when his health was better, but I didn’t meet my fiance until a year or so after he had become ill. Cancer. The modern day plague, no medicine can ever completely conquer it. One kind beats it, and then another type takes its place to do its damage. Up until a few weeks before he passed, his mind was fairly clear and sharp as it always was. We would go and visit them often and while there, I would talk to him as though nothing were wrong, and I honestly hope that it made a difference to him during those days.

When everyone else was sitting around being very solemn, being a natural clown, I did what I could to make him smile or laugh. It’s been a good defense of mine for a very long time to make jokes and try and get people to smile when things are too serious.

If you take life too seriously, you won’t make it out alive you know. At least that’s what I like to believe. She asked me if I honestly believed that he would be in no pain when he passed. There have been many questions like that over the past few weeks. My short answer was yes, he had left the physical plane and moved beyond all the suffering that his body had been going through. He would once again be himself.

Remember them for who they were when they were whole is what I told her. An uncle and her other grandmother had preceded her grandfather, but being older and having been through much more only made it harder to say goodbye and remember what once was, and not say that it’s over. But she had done it before, she has her moments she doubts her strength, but I know the things she is capable of, it will hurt, and the empty space that takes the place of her heart will lessen with time.

Time will heal her wounds, and her strength will carry her to that time. When she stumbles, I will be there to catch her.

Her grandfather was a self made man. In the middle of a successful career, he left it and started his own plastics business. You know those plastic panels that line the hockey rink in American Airlines Center? His company made those. He imparted me with knowledge from his own life, and I soaked up every possible minute of it, even when it seemed as though he would never finish a sentence. I was marrying his favorite grand-daughter and he had to make sure that I was suitable for her. He did just that.

He asked me all sorts of questions when we first met, never in front of my now fiance, but away from everyone else. Some questions didn’t make much sense at first, but I still have a tendency to look at the micro instead of the macro. He has three grown children, each of whom have their own children, and I believe one of them even have their own as well, making him a great-grandfather at the age of 84, and happily married for 60 years.

The width of his love of a single woman has spread itself beyond what he could have possibly imagined. It’s something like this that he tried to let me know is possible from a full lifetime of living and loving. For loving me and wishing me and his granddaughter best luck, I love you too Donald Walker, rest in piece.