When I last wrote a blog entry, it was at the end of 2023. Six weeks before, while I was in Miami for a meeting, my daughter had found my wife unresponsive one morning and called 911. Elizabeth had extremely low blood sugar and came home after half a day in the ER, alive thanks to my daughter’s quick action and attentive EMTs and the ER medical staff.
My wife died 9 months later. What we did not know at the time of that ER visit was that she was starting to incubate multiple lung infections, which her primary care physician did not catch, and she landed in the hospital in mid-June where the staff discovered the infections: one “normal” infection that was treatable with a standard antibiotic regimen, the stubborn fungal infection Valley fever, and a mycobacterium infection (a noninfectious relative of TB). She came home for two weeks, but her body could not fight some of the complications, and she died last July 22nd.
Elizabeth and I started dating in September 1984 and were married for 36 years. She had her own career, or rather two careers in education, in early childhood education and K-12 special education, and was often amused by academic perspectives on education, including mine. She was a critical friend in the best sense of the term, and that is one of the many ways that I miss her.
She died a year and a day after our dear friend Barbara Shircliffe, and a little over two months after one of my nephews. My break in writing publicly here reflects the last few years of loss. I will likely restart writing in the near future, or that is my intent. Life is precious and fragile, and there are no guarantees.