It's been a rough week for our family. Last week, we got the news that my 80 year old father-in-law had been admitted to the hospital. At first, we weren't too concerned. Both of my husband's parents had had so many medical issues over the years that trips to the hospital have been pretty common over the years. However, it is becoming clear that this is not a typical hospital stay for him. Over the past week, we have learned that he has had multiple heart attacks, very severe pneumonia, and his organs are starting to fail. The outlook is not positive and on Tuesday, I put my husband on a plane for California.

Needless to say, I am just devastated. This dear man has been part of my family for the last 25 years and we're all really crazy about him. Not to mention that he is our only remaining parent. I hate this whole "sandwich generation" thing. It's hard enough to try and raise your kids without going through the loss of a parent every few years. Each time, it changes you in such profound ways.

Obviously, the cruise we had planned next week is out of the question. Even if Dad did rally a bit and start showing some improvement, his health is far too fragile for us to consider leaving the country. Thank heavens we bought travel insurance. Maybe we'll try it again in a couple of months. It's a big sacrifice, but I'd give all the cruises in the world if we could get him healthy again.

I would appreciate your prayers on behalf of our family. We are still hoping that there is some slim chance he could turn this around, but we are realistically preparing for the worst. This is particularly hard on our three sons and our grandchildren as they are all very close to their "Papa", especially our oldest son Ryan. Tony's parents had a big hand in raising him and they've always been the closest to him.

Tony is doing better than I expected. He's the kind who gets in there and does what needs to be done and just deals with the feelings afterwards, but I'm sure it's going to be hard on him. Me, I'm a basket case. I'm not a terribly emotional person in other ways, but I just do not deal well with grief. The last funeral I went to was for a dear friend's 85 year old father and I swear I cried harder than the family did. I just kept thinking about his wife and the family and how much they were going to miss him and I just lost it, and lost it, and lost it. Of course, it didn't help that it was in the same setting where my mother's memorial service had been just three years before, but that's pretty typical funeral behavior for me.

I swear, if anyone has any good tips for getting the waterworks under control, I would sure like to hear them! It's not only embarassing and undiginified, but I have bad sinuses to begin with and after a while, it literally feels like my head is going to explode. This week, I've been trying distraction techniques. Any time I start feeling too sad or upset, I immediately pick up a book or turn on the TV, or play a computer game and that seems to help a bit, but then I have that 3:30 wake up call in the middle of the night. I swear, you could almost set your clock by it. Any time I'm worried or upset about anything, I wake up right at the stroke of 3:30 and just lay there and fret and fuss about it until about 5:00, when I usually manage to fall back asleep just in time for my 6:30 alarm clock - ugh! It is the worst thing in the world.

Anyway, here I am rambling on and probably getting way too personal for a public blog, but it is comforting to express some of my feelings and let my friends know what is going on with me. This is definitely not the week we had planned, but sometimes life throws you a curveball and you just have to do the best you can with it.