You missed a barbecue

Last weekend was really rough. Thankfully, this weekend has been better. The boys went out to your sister's this afternoon so they could watch Z's baseball game and play, and then I met them over there for dinner.  You would have loved it.

Other than the lunch she hosted the day we buried you, this is the first time we'd all been together. There was no way to not notice the empty chair at the end of the table.

I wish you had been there. We all did.

I had a text conversation with my friend Cindy from Iowa today. It constantly amazes me how many people knew you, how many people know you died. Cindy said she's heard from quite a few people about it.

Towards the end of the conversation, she said she hopes I am able to find peace and something else, I can't remember. That she hopes it gets easier.

I've been thinking about that a lot these last few days. Today I realized I'm probably never going to be at peace with what you did. It won't get easier, it will just get farther and farther away.

That's the shitty thing about suicide. You could have written us a two-hundred page goodbye letter and we still would not understand why you felt you had the right to end your goddamn life that morning. I want to scream in your face that is not your decision to make!

Your sister read me an email she got from your college girlfriend. She lives in Greece now, did you know that? It was strange, listening to her words describing you. I'm having a hard time getting a clear picture of who you really were, what you really thought. Right now, your final moments are clouding the last ten years we spent together.

I never did get that letter from your attorney. You've been working with Sally for twenty-five years. Two divorces, hundreds of traffic tickets, countless hours of consultation on whether you should sue the company you were working for. I asked my attorney to notify her that you'd died that Saturday night. She said she was going to write me a letter. 

She still hasn't.

She also totally fucked up our wills. I haven't even had a chance to tell you about that yet. In the spot where you name a personal representative, it was supposed to read the spouse in the case one survived the other, which is in fact exactly what happened.

Instead, the dumbshit named my brother and then your sister.

I can get it fixed, it'll just cost me more money. I had to have an insurance company bond me as trustworthy of managing the money that I am going to inherit anyway. It's so fucked up, Neil. Typical Sally.

Then I learned that wills are nice and everything, but beneficiary designations trump everything. I wasn't sure at first, had you ever changed your beneficiaries after you and Melinda divorced? Now I know you did, everything is fine. But if you hadn't, she would be getting your money.  Strange, isn't it? I don't even think she knows you're gone.

I'm not going to contact her. But I do wonder, what would I learn about you if I did? What did she know that I didn't?