What's Up with Tim?

Did I mention that I am sixty years old as of November 24th? The significance of being sixty for me is that I'm now qualified for Social Security Survivors benefits (on account of losing my wife Rita to cancer while living and working in Germany three years ago). I'll be collecting on her Social Security for at least the next couple years. It's not very much money to be sure but it's better than a stick in the eye. She had nearly every type of cancer you can think of at one time or another. She'd already survived uterine cancer when I married her at 32. At age 50, she received experimental treatment on a skin cancer lesion and then eight years later, her lung cancer and bone tumors were diagnosed.. In the end, it wasn't the bone or lung tumors that did her in. It was the brain tumor. I had to get old before discovering that nearly all lung cancer patients end up with brain tumors. There are some things I wish I had no awareness of. Here's a brief bio done on my late wife when she was in her teens by a newspaper in Texas. https://thetimchannel.wordpress.com/2013/07/25/high-society/

I've been to the Social Security office and filled out the paperwork but I've got to retrieve one document to get my benefits rolling. The last hurdle in getting my benefits moving is obtaining a copy of my marriage license from Ranking County in Mississippi. I don't see an online option for retrieval, and given the fact that Mississippi is operating ten to twenty years behind the rest of the country I'm not surprised. I'll have to call them on Monday and see what is involved in retrieving said document. I'm left to wonder why the Social Security folks didn't need it when I requested the one-time spousal death benefit ($255) from them a couple years ago? I was chased out of Germany so quickly after the death of my wife that I lost nearly everything I owned. I was able to escape with only four suitcases and my dog Bandit (RIP 2017). .

Along with the loss of my wife came the loss of our foreign business, our life savings, as well as any semblance of normalcy one might marginally expect to find in a man of my culture and education. The loss of my wife after 25 years of marriage was as horrible as one might expect. If there's any silver lining at all in the experience it was the excellent FREE government healthcare she received in Germany and the fact that we had plenty of time to make our peace with the inevitable. Rita was a remarkable woman who never feared death. She did fear dying a painful death and that was averted by the excellent pain management skills of several doctors. I am thankful that her illness was diagnosed abroad. I shudder to think of the misery she might have suffered under the much stricter pain management protocols here in the US.

Even as the fading leaves of fall remind us of our own mortality, it is soothing to remind oneself that autumn is a second spring where every leaf is reborn as a flower.

Here's the eulogy I delivered at her graveside.

Enjoy.