The circle of life takes no holidays

I have put off blogging about Christmas. I thought this was too much of a bummer to post so close to the holiday. Christmas Eve and Christmas Day went fine. We had a good time with my family and although things happened with his family that were stressful and disappointing, things worked out OK. But tonight, we are going to a memorial service/wake for an old friend of Tim's who died 3 days before Christmas. It is just unfathomable to us that Joe is gone. What is just as hard to accept is that a healthy man with a wife, beautiful home, and 3 great boys, threw it all away and drank himself to death. Joe's father died of alcoholism when Joe was a highschool senior. I guess Joe, and his brother who almost died of liver failure IN HIS 30'S, never got over it and felt it was their own Irish destiny to do the same. Joe's wife, Kirsten, called us just minutes before my family arrived for Christmas Eve dinner. We had already heard the news but it seemed  like she needed to talk this out, so we did. His once close family has taken their pain out on her and they are not on good terms and she knew this was something we know about here, as well as dealing with illness and tragedy. She is going through this with NO family support, aside from her dad, which is all she really has of her own family. She did OK talking with me but when Tim got on the phone, just the sound of his voice made her hysterical(they've known each other since 6th grade). For the sake of her boys(the youngest is 11), she wanted to have a private service with immediate family only but Joe's siblings went nuts on her for that. She let them have their way but this will be brutal for them tonight. When Tim was first hospitalized and we found out they were testing him for cancer, I was much worse when there were people around me. To have everyone's grief in the same room and see the pain on all their faces was overwhelming and I had a harder time holding it together. That's how this will be tonight. I am sure noone will be holding it together. WAY too much grief coming in rogue waves of sheer agony. For Tim and I, there will be no way we cannot think about when/if this will be our family going through this so I can assure you this night will be burned into our memory like an unwelcome branding. It will be left unspoken but both of us will be thinking the same excruciating things. I think this process is brutal, especially when it is someone who died too young. I don't really think it helps the immediate family. I think it gives them painful memories of intense grief to add to the ones they already have. The only upshot I see is that it shows them how many people cared for their loved one. After having to watch their wonderful father/husband turn into someone they didn't know, they will see that Joe was loved and respected by a LOT of people and that we all knew the real Joe, not the broken, hopeless man he became in the last 2 years. I just think there are less painful ways to accomplish this.Today, my heart aches for Joe, his siblings and nieces, and especially his wife and sons who not only lost their husband and dad, but their whole family because they blamed Kirsten for handling things a certain way. She really had no choice. Her sons' lives were being ruined. But now they've also lost 3 sets of aunts and uncles and 3 cousins. This is the same thing I see happening in Tim's family. Folks are just too self-absorbed to see anything but how things affect themselves, not anyone else. They are incapable of putting anyone else first, not even a person who is fighting a terminal illness. It's all about them. I guess when you add high levels of stress and pain to a dysfunctional family, this is what you get. They blow apart instead of coming together. And instead of the family who is suffering the greatest loss/pain being helped and loved through it, their support system collapses underneath them. I'll say it again, it takes guts to hang in there with a friend or family member who is dealing with a tragedy. You find out who has the guts and who doesn't. Well, Tim and I have guts. We were on the phone with Kirsten again last night and we WILL be there for her and her boys, despite how hard this is under our own circumstances, because it's WHAT YOU DO when you are a true friend. You suck it up and help them when they need you. If hard knocks in life have any benefit at all, it's that you can sympathize with folks going through similar situations. R.I.P. Joseph Patrick Herlihy, Jr. You are
sorely missed and loved by many.