A Brief Personal Message to Our Members

Hi Everyone,

I know it's been awhile since my last post, and I thought I'd let you know the reasons why.

Just after Thanksgiving my mom began having some health issues that were based on some underlying conditions she had had for several years.  She was in and out of the hospital for a couple of weeks, but in early December she required a longer stay to get at the root cause of her problems.  We were expecting her to be home in a few days, but her illness lingered.  Although she fought hard and rallied over the next few weeks, she passed away at the age of 94 on December 28th.

As you know, I have been taking care of her for the past several years, and more intensively over these past 2-3 years.  As her primary caretaker, I was involved in the management of her health and living 24/7, even spending 20 hours a day at the hospital over the final weeks of her life.  As you can probably imagine, that created a deep and strong bond between us.  It has been a very difficult few months since she first began having issues, and I have had neither the time nor the inclination to participate in a lot of outside activities, including this forum.

My mom was a huge football fan.  She loved the game and knew a lot about it.  Even though we lived in the same house we never watched the games together, but I would always come upstairs several times during football Sundays/Mondays/Thursdays/Saturdays to talk about the day's action.  I guess I should've known that her time on Earth was getting short when she would fall asleep during the games, even those featuring her two favorite teams, the Eagles and Cowboys; and seemed to lose interest in how the season was progressing.  Unfortunately, I didn't see the signs...not that it would have done any good, I suppose, since she was on an inevitable path to her end of days.

For me, the strangest and saddest aspect of the end of the Cowboys' season came in the minutes after the FG went through the uprights and I realized that my mom wasn't going to be upstairs to commiserate with me about the twists and turns of the game as she always did.  It was the definitive end of that part of my life, and football season will never be quite the same for me ever again.  Nor will anything else, I suppose.

Over the next few months I will be working on de-cluttering her house and getting it on the market, at which point I'll be without a home.  I'll be a free agent in the truest sense of the word, and I'll be figuring out my place in the world.  It could be an interesting and exciting adventure, one that I hope will have a happy ending.

I'll be returning to the forum, and I do have many thoughts on several different aspects of the 2016 season that I will be sharing.  The 2016 season was fun, exciting, unexpected, and fulfilling.  In fact, it's the only thing about the entire cursed year that I will choose to remember.  The rest of 2016 can go to Hell and burn there forever.

I think, as Cowboys fans, we'll have a lot to look forward to over the next few years.  I consider this past season to have been a down payment on good times ahead, and I think it will be a fun and interesting ride on the Cowboys bandwagon.  We'll see.

But that's for later.  For now, I'll prepare my recap of the season and talk to you over in the Cowboys forum soon.

Thanks for reading.

'59

Condolences, my friend. I know a lot of time has passed, but you will still be in my prayers.