A homage: Loss and Pain

My wife and I are expecting our first child on 7 April 2015. My wife is an only child and since her twenties, her parents have hinted they want a grandchild. We got married on 12/12/12 and were delighted to announce in 2014 that we were expecting. Thursday 19 March 2015, at our last scan, it was conclusively confirmed that our baby would be a girl. My wife's parents always wanted a girl. My father-in-law, only 10 years older than me, is like a father and older brother to me. He accepted my daughter from another marriage like his own and was a caring, generous and good man. Sunday 22 March 2015 he died of a heart attack while shopping online for an outfit for his new grand daughter. My wife being so pregnant cannot fly home to support her mother, cannot grieve out of concern for the baby and feels helpless as the only child in how to help. I cannot imagine how her mother feels losing her husband, I cannot imagine how my wife feels losing her father. I cannot imagine how they both feel knowing a grand child is on the way!




Life is cruel.




My homage: Vladimir, you were a kind, generous man who always put family first. I remember how you threw a snow ball at my daughter the first time you met her; I remember how you taught me how to drink vodka, how you always bought us beers to try together; how you would always organise a braai for me when we were visiting; how you helped us paint our house, fix things and buy us things.




Who will help me board the loft, put legs onto the boxes to make them tables, leave pounds for Skye, take Kaia out for walks and throw snowballs at her too?


I miss you.


Who said it is better to love and lose than never to love at all,
I have loved and lost
I was loved and lost
Will my heart ever recover


Every time I look at her
I will remember your absence
Three women at loss
A wife, a daughter, a grand daughter


I don't understand
I struggle to accept
Why the good die young
While evil men live to decapitate another innocent life


If your god loves
And yet allows this to happen
Then either he has no control of life
Or if he does, I don't want to believe in him


Life is what it is
Life
And then we die
Love and loss


Vladimir Filiptsik, husband, father, grand father, 'father and brother' (1963-2015)