Cancer

by on June 2, 2022 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Diaries

I left my mom at the hospice on Tuesday. I got home and didn’t sleep a wink, no matter how hard I tried. Then I went to work before returning to a home full of memories. This was the first house she ever bought. The one she purchased because she worked at the Mayo Clinic and any bank would give her a loan based on that. It was her first true home. In a lifetime of renting, she’d never managed to talk my dad into actually buying a place. But he’d left, she’d gotten a degree, she’d gotten a good job, and this was it. The end of her nomadic renting ways. This was home, and she filled it with a lifetime of memories. Family knickknacks and pictures and all the things she wanted around her. Now she will never add another memory to it. And I’m just trying to come to terms with that.

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Cancer

by on June 1, 2022 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Diaries

Today I left my mom at a hospice in the Twin Cities. They are good from everything I’ve read and everything I’ve heard from family and other people. And from my visit today, they truly do seem to care. But that doesn’t take away from the fact that I just left my mom an hour and a half away. I can’t be there to represent her every day because I can’t be there every day. And just to add more fun, because they are undergoing renovations right now, they are under extra fire marshal supervision, and I can’t even put up an air mattress to sleep on in her room while up there. So I need other options to sleep while up there. I left her an hour and a half away, I drove back home, and I won’t be able to see her again until Friday. And I don’t know what I’m going to do next.

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Louis

by on May 31, 2022 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Diaries

The many deaths of Louis Mattioli are spread out all over explored space and beyond. He has a lot of graves on a lot of worlds, and sometimes he claimed the first plot of Cowboy Country on a new world. Other times, we’ve never been able to find out what happened to him out there in the dark. He just… went out and never came back. That happens to us more often than we’d like to admit. But a new Louis was always decanted in time, and went out to do his duty again. Based off the most recent backup, he knew everything he’d known before he left, and sometimes that made it easier to try again. Sometimes it didn’t. But Louis never gave up. He was stubborn that way. It was one of his better traits.

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Memorial Day

by on May 30, 2022 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Diaries

My family has a tradition of service. Army. Army Air Force. The modern Air Force. The Navy. We’re even represented in the Marine Corps. We’ve all come home. We’ve all made families and left behind new generations to go on after we are done. Not everyone has been so lucky. I have friends with family who just… never came back from Over There. A branch of the family tree that ends in France. Or wherever. And there are so many others. So many more out there. Some entire families have ended Over There. Today we remember them. The boys and girls who never came home. Who never got to raise a family when it was all done. They paid the ultimate price. We should forever remember it. We should forever remember them. Hail to the victorious dead.

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Louis

by on May 29, 2022 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Diaries

Louis Mattioli was a good Cowboy for a long time after War’s End. He lived up to everything we stood for. Truth. Justice. The American Way. All that jazz and more. He had his problems, but he kept them from showing in his work. As long as I wasn’t involved. He helped a lot of people over the decades. He fought a lot of fights, and he won most of them. Entire planets owe him a debt that can never be repaid. They are free because of him. Because when they called for help, he answered. He put his life on the line for them. Again and again and again, he did everything a Cowboy was supposed to do. Everything we’ve devoted our very long lives to. He devoted most of his to that same goal. When it comes time to tally up his legacy, we should never forget that.

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