It’s been a long hard week in a string of long hard weeks. Lots of negative vibes blowing all over the place, in various directions.

It was only two hours after I had just touched down in Phoenix on Tuesday that we learned Tracey’s dad had passed away. The fact that he had been ill for a while, and that Tracey had been estranged from her parents for the better part of two decades, did little to offset the shock and sadness of the news. After all, he was still her father, and there was this not-so-minor issue of having to communicate the news to her twin sister given her situation and her fragile state of mind. So, we got permission to drive over to the psychiatric hospital where Tam was staying to see her after visiting hours were over and break her the difficult news.

When it rains, it pours.

What is truly tragic about their father’s passing was that the last communication he had with either of them was while Tam was still in Florida, and just out of a psychiatric hospital with nowhere else to go. At that time, she had just been released from a psychiatric hospital there and was looking for a place to hang for a week while we took our then-planned vacation to New Orleans. It was at that time that her dad told her in no uncertain terms that, not only was she not welcome to stay with them, that she should not even try to contact them by phone because they couldn’t afford her reversing the charges. I mean, we’re talking a pretty desperate situation all around.

A pretty sad way for a father to leave this world, if you ask me.

Of course, coming from the totally loving and supportive family situation I have been blessed to have always been part of, I can’t imagine my parents ever turning their backs on me. However, seeing the kind of state Tam was in psychologically when I extracted her from the hellish situation she was in back in St. Petersburg, and the way things kind of degenerated after she came here, who am I to judge? Maybe everything just works out the way it was destined to work out.

We all have our faults and our weaknesses we will have to account for after our time on this earth is through.

Anyways, I’m back in action again, not sure for how long. After the way this year has gone, all I can say is we’ll see how it goes.