It’s time to take a tour of America, to see some ties but mostly to seek out people I love and tell them “thank you”

It’s usually not wise to write from the bottom of a whiskey bottle, but it’s where I am tonight…an old man needing to give thanks….

                  IT’S LATE ON a Sunday night and I’ve just about drained a bottle of really good bourbon because it’s time to say some goodbyes.

                  Yesterday I put up a post saying farewell to a wonderful friend who was in stage 4 cancer and opted to call it a life and go into hospice.  I sent him an email telling him I loved him, cracking a joke and then tonight got a text from a mutual friend telling me he was gone.

                  So, started pouring the whiskey and thinking about life. Or rather, its end. I don’t usually write when I am going beyond casual drunk, mainly because responding to the autocorrect typos drive me crazy, but tonight is an exception. I hope it makes sense on some level.

                  I wanted to say goodbye to Don, but I couldn’t. When I got word he had died I was flooded by all the goodbyes I wanted to say. But first, a memory.

                  IT WAS IN the summer of 1970, in Wilmington, Ohio. My grandfather was in a nursing home, almost blind. One summer evening my mother and I took him on a drive. He wanted to take a tour of where he had lived in our county. We went down below the spill way below Lake Cowen in Clinton County. We drove through farm country where his family had owned land and where he had grown up. We ended up at a farm just on the edge of Wilmington where he had lived when my mother was born and where he had built a barn and my mother had been born.

                   We pulled up to the barn. I helped him walk over to the wall and he put his hand on it and stood quietly. He had hauled wood, sawed boards, nailed them into place so long ago and now he stood and he put his hand on the wood put in place, stroked it then walked back to the car. It was his farewell tour.

                  I think back on that and I realize that I am within a year or so being his age when he stood in what I think was a moment of prayer and reembrace and love for the family that had been a part of those planks.

                  Now, as I approach his age, I want to say good-bye. And I will. I can’t leave town right now because my wife is in memory care with dementia and I have made promise not to leave her so long as she knows me.

                  BUT THE MOMENT she no longer knows me I will pack up the car and  will go and I will crisscross the county saying I love you and goodbye.

                  Don’s passing,  as well as so many others – life at 80 seems to be an endless stream of messages that begin with “did you hear….” and then pronounce death – has made me realize there are so many people out there I need to thank for being a part of my life and to say goodbye to.

                  There is also a country I need to say goodbye to.

                  In this time of Donald Trump it is so easy, so almost inevitable, to somehow think less of this country. But I know from a lifetime of traveling it that even in the most rundown, Godforsaken parts of it there are spots of roadside beauty and amazement. to be taken aback by and to just stare at. There are parts of it I want to see again and others I want to see for the first time. 

                  The day is approaching when my wife will not know me and I will cry. I will curse fate and damn the unfairness of it all. But then I am going to lock the door to the apartment, throw the gear in the car and I am doing to drive and drive and drive until I have seen everyone who has made my life what it has been and I have told them I love them and said “thank you” – in some cases for the first time, in others for the last time.

                  Along the way I will see my country, absent the specter of the madman in DC,  along roadsides, in country diners and in sunsets and sunrises and campgrounds.

                  That’s my plan, and thanks, Don, for helping me make it. Hope it makes sense. Hope it happens. Hope it’s not just the whiskey talking at midnight….

Rich Heiland is a retired journalist and semi-retired consultant, trainer and public speaker. During his journalism career he was a reporter, editor, publisher, college instructor, part of a Pulitzer Prize-winning team and a National Newspaper Association Columnist of the Year honoree. He also writes the intodementia.com blog about his family’s experience with dementia. He lives in West Chester, PA and can be reached at [email protected].