My Father-in-Law Died Yesterday

My father-in-law loved Las Vegas.

Peacefully, with one of his sons at his side. My husband and I were on our way home...turned around and came back to Las Vegas. It was a beautiful sunny holiday Monday, which feels so weird. Don't know what weather would be appropriate...crazy torrential rainstorms? 

My father-in-law and I had lots of conversations over the years that I knew him, just me and him. He was no stranger to hardship and grief--losing a baby to cancer, and his first wife in a car wreck when she was 39 and they had three little kids. The thing that he told me in all those conversations that sticks with me the most is this:

"I don't want people to say of me, 'Look at that man, he's had so many horrible things happen to him, oh how he's suffered.' I want them to say, 'Look at how he picked himself up and kept going."

Love to my dear father-in-law. I can't believe he's gone.

P.S. And here is something small and beautiful that my husband wrote sitting in the hospital room with his father's body, waiting for the mortuary, tears running down his cheeks as he wrote:

"I never really knew my father, but I felt love for him. He was always in my life, but his past was always a mystery. He helped to shape me into who I am. He picked me up when I fell. He taught me to see the world as it is. Without him I would have been lost. I am going to miss the father that I never really knew. I am going to miss my dad."