20120217 Friday – sad day

My friend Joe Ribeau - R.I.P., Joe.

All of the news that I have is overwhelmed by the news that I got on facebook tonight… our friend Joe Ribeau passed away, probably on Monday or Tuesday.

I’d cancelled dinner with him on Friday and we were going to go Tuesday, and he didn’t answer his phone or return messages… unlike him. Sometimes he’d forget that he turned his phone off, though, so I didn’t worry.
He’d been complaining about his GERD… that had been diagnosed… but that pain is a lot like what almost killed me in 1989 – a left main coronary occlusion – and what killed Tyler last April. I really feel bad that I didn’t pursue that more, but I thought that he knew what he was talking about…

Joe had been an acquaintance for many years, and we were getting closer this last year. We’d always enjoyed each others’ company, and we did save some lives together. Joe worked nights as a respiratory therapist and was pretty damned good at it.

He’d watched the cats and the house when we were gone, and we’d been on several picture-taking expeditions, and he went with Jean and I when we set the telescope up down by Emporia… that’s when I got the picture.

I think that it was last Thursday when he and I took some chairs in to the upholstery shop, that would have been the last time I saw him.

We will miss him a lot.

There was no obituary in the Topeka paper… I hate to find out these things on Facebook, dammit. The last call that I made to him went directly to voice mail… someone else said that his mom couldn’t get him on the phone (he would call her faithfully every night) and she sent someone over to check on him and found him dead… they didn’t know what day that was, though.

I made it to my doc’s appointment today at 14:00… he’d called me, since I had not written it down.

The doc is a psychologist… I’ve been having anxiety about the damned defibrillator going off and that’s kinda teamed up with the free-floating grief that’s been following me forever, it seems. Joe’s passing isn’t going to help any with that, of course.

Anyway, he thinks that it’s normal to be afraid of being hurt by something that’s hurt you before… speaking of the defibrillator… and that it would get better with time.

I’m more used to thinking that time is my enemy, and not my friend….

“Millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burned, tortured, fined, and imprisoned, yet we have not advanced one inch toward uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one half of the world fools and the other half hypocrites.” – Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia

Thanx for being here… all these years!!!!

All material © 1963-2012 by Douglas C. Franklin