Talk Thursday: The Blog Post that Didn't Happen

I dunno if this blog post is going to happen.

It started out pretty well. I was talking about the Rangers. I mean, what else would I talk about? Tonight is Game Six of the World Series, the Rangers are ahead three games to two, and This Could Be The Night that makes it all worthwhile. Not that it isn't worthwhile, anyway. I mean, it's baseball. It's the only sport, apart from hockey, that I can convince myself to be interested in for more than five minutes. Mainly because it's like an outdoor carnival without any rides, and the people-watching is just as much fun as the actual game (as opposed to hockey, in which everything just happens too darn fast for me to get bored), but anyway, I was talking about the Rangers.

Then I started thinking about my boss's boss's daughter again, and all the fun went out of the Rangers.

You see, my boss's boss's daughter has been very sick. She went to the hospital about three weeks ago and they found a brain tumor. The adjectives they pinned to this thing weren't exactly encouraging. Words like fast-growing and inoperable and malignant. She was supposed to go to M.D. Anderson to be examined by a specialist, but she became too sick to travel and soon after lost consciousness. Sometime during the night last night, she died. She was nineteen years old. And so I just can't quite get up the usual enthusiasm that I normally would for Game Six of the World Series.

It's a big world and bad things happen in it. I get that. And sometimes very young people die of mysterious causes and it's monstrously unfair. I get that, too. And it's Quite Normal to find this sort of stuff depressing and be mopey and out of sorts about it. Yep, no problem there. But how do you write a blog post about this? I mean, how do you combine the Rangers with your boss's boss's daughter dying without looking kind of insane?

I might add, I didn't know my boss's boss's daughter. I've never met her. I know my boss's boss, though, and I've met his wife, and they're good people. I can't even remotely imagine what it must be like to lose a child (I don't have kids, myself). I've lost grandparents, good friends, one friend in particular that felt like getting an arm chopped off, but it can't even remotely compare to losing a child. That's losing a whole future. A whole rest-of-your-life. How do you write about that? I can't even think about it for more than a few seconds at a time.

So I don't think this blog post is going to happen. I think I've given it the old college try, though, and I can slouch off to my meeting having made a decent effort. If the Rangers win tonight, it'll be the weirdest mix of emotions I've dealt with since I stole my ex's vacuum cleaner to get back at her for stealing my cat. And I'm not even going to try to explain what that felt like.