Tag Archives: fate

Life can deal cruelty

Mitt Romney once told an audience near the end of the 2012 presidential campaign that there is much more to life than politics.

The Republican presidential nominee could not have spoken truer words.

This week I received some devastating news. It reminds me that all the handwringing I’ve been doing about Donald Trump’s effort to win re-election seeks to deal in relative pettiness.

The news was this: A dear friend I have known longer than any other human being sent me a message to tell me that a fire had destroyed his mother’s house. Worse than that, his brother lost his life in the inferno.

Yes, I knew my dear friend’s brother. I considered him a friend as well.

My friend’s mother is recovering from burns she suffered in the blaze. Her heart won’t ever recover fully from the horrific loss she has suffered. Nor will my friend’s heart ever be healed completely. Nor will those of his sisters or their children, or his son or his granddaughter.

Events such as this yank my attention away from the petty political chicanery that has enveloped the nation. This tragedy has focused my attention on real life, on the cruelty that fate can deliver. It hammers humanity when we are looking the other way.

It reminds me of the pain that life occasionally brings to those who never deserve to feel it.

I have been watching the political maneuvering, as I always do. My attention is being pulled away to matters that affect me far more deeply than who should win the next presidential election.

I’ve been reminded that there is far more to life than politics.

I cherish my life, but sometimes life really sucks.

Happy birthday, Dad

This is a picture of my father. His name was Pete Kanelis.

My sis snapped this picture in 1979, a year before Dad died in a boating accident that to this day still gives me great pain. He was 59 years of age when he died in the accident just north of Vancouver, British Columbia, where he was cavorting with friends and business associates on a business/fishing trip.

I want to mention Dad to you today because Saturday would have been his 96th birthday.

Apart from the obvious feelings of loss and grief I felt for seemingly the longest time in my life, my feelings today as I remember Dad are a bit more, oh, philosophical.

Fate dealt us all quite a blow that day when the call came to me the day after Dad died. The very last thing I said to him before he departed Portland for Canada was, “I’ll see you Wednesday.” The call arrived on a Monday morning. The news was terrible.

I think of Dad — and Mom, too — in ways that boggle my mind at times.

What would they be like had they lived long enough to grow old? What kind of old folks would they have been? As it is, I have spent a good bit more time on Earth than either of them were able to do. Mom died four years after Dad at the age of 61.

I have my own theory — and that’s all it can be — about how Dad and Mom would have aged had they been given the opportunity. Dad was one of seven siblings and he — more than any of his brothers and sisters — valued family relationships. My sense is that he likely would have been a bit clingy, that he might have resisted the career opportunity I sought when my wife, sons and I moved to Texas in 1984. Mom would have been more accepting of it. Had she been able to grow old without Dad, I believe as well that Mom would have returned more to be like the young woman — full of vim of vigor — that she recalled occasionally about herself.

The thing about fate, though, is that you cannot take it back. You cannot relive moments that come and go. Life doesn’t give us any do-overs.

So … with that I am left only to wish that Dad were here to celebrate his 96th birthday. If only fate hadn’t intervened.

I still miss him every day.