I am overwhelmed with grief for a man I only knew through reading his internet postings.  He was one of my uncles.  I only encountered him a few times and that was before I was 10 years old.  I read his Facebook postings - he kept a blog-like posting of things that were happening to him as the disease advanced.  https://www.facebook.com/bill.barkley.98

His beloved doggy died suddenly on him last month, he had posted and pics of him with the dog. Dogs bring out things in us human folks.  That is a fact.  You see the pic and you might understand what I am saying.

That's uncle Bill.  The thing that gets me about this photo?  This looks exactly like my dad, of whom I haven't spoken with in over a year and I have absolutely NO idea how he is doing. I finally got their phone number and have been calling and calling and calling, with no answer.  Ugh. I want to see my dad. I don't have good feelings about his situation.

Uncle Bill posted that picture last month. When I read what happened with the doggy dying, the thought came to my mind: he won't be with us next month. I have been hearing futuristic events about my and other people's lives since I was a teenager.  I distinctly remember this: He's going to die next month - it was pictured in my mind in huge words like you would see on a billboard. How do you tell people that stuff? You just don't. Why do these things even come to me? Well, this one about someone's death isn't a daily occurrence.

I want to take a pause in life and say, okay, I need to deal with this and move on.  And if it were immediate family, I would.  I've been having a bad feeling about my dad for a few months now.  But nothing like the words flowing through my head about my uncle.

I have to get away from here.  I need the solitude that the excursions to the mountains used to give me. There are no mountains around here.

For all the things that happened today, I just can't anymore with this.