“And they lived happily ever after” — a clear indication that after whatever it was there is no longer anything interesting to say about the matter.
I beg to differ, and this picture tells part of the story. We’re hopelessly romantic, or at least I am.
Planning My Departure
I suspect it’s always messy when someone dies. Everything suddenly interrupted. All sorts of loose ends. My friend Frank Wennin died the last week of April 2023, of what were told was a ruptured heart. Erik Verbeek called us to say he’d learned about it when he tried to call Frank’s phone, and a neighbor picked up telling him Frank was gone. The neighbor couldn’t get into Frank’s phone, but he could answer calls.
Frank was in his fifties, I believe. We hadn’t been close or in touch recently, but I knew he had lots of plans and hopes and somehow managed to get by, though he was often asking us for money, and sometimes we gave. His ideas were usually cock-eyed, grandiose, and impractical (or at any rate so it seemed to me). Occasionally he had one or two clever ones — Playforce was one of his inventions, and he purchased Playforce.com, which I subsequently developed to showcase his ideas. But they never led anywhere, and I didn’t trust any of the folks he introduced us to, often self-important but uninteresting.
Not sure why I’m writing all this out, except that perhaps my current mood is partly the result of grieving. Though I never really accepted him as a brother or let him into my heart; I felt he was always bothering me, trying to convince me of something that was either obscure or obvious or was his own made-up version of something he heard from someone else. Or maybe it’s because I think I’m a kind of Frank myself. All self-important, but in the end not much to add to what’s already been said about the world. (Of course, I want to prove that wrong.)
In any case, my purpose for adding this note is to think about leaving gracefully, winding up my affairs (paltry as they seem), and making it easy for Victoria to go on without me. I don’t think this is morbid. We all have to go sometime, and the more conscious we can be about the better.