It’s tough logging on and seeing the last thing you wrote, when that’s a eulogy that comes nowhere near grasping the impact on your life the deceased has.

And words like deceased and eulogy come nowhere close to describing the pain or joy or humbleness you feel when trying to describe how important someone was to you.

I know I’m not the first person to try to talk about it, and to feel the flush of moisture and heat to the eyes, to blink the tears away, and to find a crutch to focus on, but one of the beauties and one of the pains of life is that no matter how many people have been through what you’re going through, it’s always personal. Life is personal.

So while I sat down at my laptop tonight to write about the virus and the situations it’s putting us in, I find myself in the strange position of being brought to tears at my own words, at finding that no amount of pleasurable wine buzz can numb the knowledge that I’ll be going onwards without a grandfather. All the things going on in the world right now, the quarantines, and the conspiracies, and the stupid distracting videos and photos (I posted one tonight) can distract me all I let them until I think about however this pandemic has changed life, mine is changed in a way I always expected and still can’t cope with.

Incidentally, my grandfather didn’t die of the coronavirus. Given how stubborn he was, the only thing that would have bested him was himself, and it was his own body packing it in that finally gave him the rest he deserved. Not even a pandemic was going to tell him he was done.