"LET'S SAY ALL THE THINGS WE NEVER SAID"

I've been toying with the idea of a blog for sometime, tinkering with this actual blog for several weeks, all with a vague idea that eventually, someday, at some point I would go "live" with it and open it to the public to read (and by public I mean the staggeringly small circle of friends who really like my Facebook status updates.) Procrastination is a forte.

I was smacked hard by reality and reminded last week that life is short and fleeting and uncertain. I attended the funeral of a friend. A sudden death. A freak accident. The unthinkable loss of a man big in stature, big in laugh, big in heart. A larger than life lifeforce was snuffed out.

We didn't hang out together nearly enough, though when we did the talking and the laughing was neverending. And raucous. We never spoke on the phone enough, though when we did, we ate up minutes on our calling plans forgetting to talk shop and veering off onto a zillion other topics on which we saw eye to eye. We kept trying to ID a time for me to visit with the family down in New Jersey. The phonecall with his wife Karen to coordinate calendars took place on a Thursday; by that Saturday morning, Bill was gone, leaving a wife and young daughter behind. And we'd never locked in a date.

I've been hearing Bill's voice and laugh in my head for over a week now. He was one of my favorite people on the planet and I'd venture to guess, everyone who considered him a friend would say the same. In a eulogy, he was called a "validator" -- he validated you. To see yourself through his eyes and know you'd earned his respect and friendship, and to know that in this wicked world there were stand-up people like him, validated you and your belief in others.

In a million years, this will never begin to make sense to me.

The best I can do to embrace the loss is make a conscious effort to appreciate that none of us are entitled to more time so we should make the most of the time we have, now. And the people we are blessed to have in our lives, too. Make sure they know it.

So, the blog is going live, now.

I have no idea what my next post will be -- funny, sarcastic, vitriolic, lighthearted, serious, melancholy?

I have no idea when my next post will go up -- posting on a regular basis is the vision and hopefully will become the reality.

I write, therefore I am.
But I AM -- so I better make the most of it.


R.I.P. Bill FitzGerald (Sept. 19, 1958 - Nov. 21, 2009)