Yesterday, March 30, 2018, I took another walk in the woods near my house in the same area I walked in on March 24, & 25. This time the snow was all gone, the morning rain had stopped and the area was just somewhere between damp and wet. I got a little farther out this time since the going was a little easier. This walk was both a part of my ongoing plan for exercise and time to meditate about the visitation last night for my friend and part-time auction employee, Tim Evans. Tim who was only 49 died suddenly on Wednesday, March 28, 2018, from a pulmonary embolism. Tim will be buried on Easter Sunday, April 1, 2018, and his first child, daughter Clarissa Christine Evans will be born on Monday, April 2, 2018. Although we were not bosom buddies, we were genuinely friends and my wife Candice & I could always count on Tim and Kim Evans when the chips were down. We had known each other since Candice & I started our auction house in Banner, KY, in August 2012. They began working with us shortly after we began that auction house and we had worked sales together all the way from Letcher County Kentucky to Kenton County Kentucky. We could trust them absolutely, respected them tremendously, and knew we could always count on them. Just about a month and a half ago we had been with them in Paintsville, KY, at a baby shower to celebrate the upcoming birth of their first daughter and they had been absolutely happy. Now, that little girl will never know her father. Kim will have to raise her alone and is facing burying her husband of nearly twenty years one day and becoming a mother the next.
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| Tim Evans & His Cat In A Dump Truck, Photo by Kim Evans |
I walked and thought, looked at the buds popping out on the early trees, the spring flowers starting to bloom after a strange winter. I have always known that life is not fair. After working twenty years in the human services professions in the fields of substance abuse, homelessness, general mental health therapy, and juvenile delinquency, I already knew that life is not fair. But something like the death of a man five days before his first biological child is born will definitely remind you of that. I had also told a local friend of mine the story of Tim's death yesterday and watched as her face took on that shocked appearance that stories like this cause. But, at the same time, you realize that no matter what happens in life if you are still alive and able bodied you pick yourself up and go on. My wife Candice, who has been in a wheelchair nearly twenty years of the twenty-five we have been married also had her worst fears triggered by Tim's death. She is worried that something similar could happen to me and leave her unable to live alone. That kind of fear is impossible to directly deal with and the possibility that it could be realized is impossible to prevent. So I am in the middle of a serious work out routine, exercise daily, eat correctly, and always take my medications. What else can you do?
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| Tim & Kim Evans, Photo By Keelie Short |
Therefore, yesterday was a great day to walk in the woods, hope unsuccessfully that I could find a few morels, and watch the spring come to the mountains near my home. I never saw any wildlife to speak of and I might have been too noisy for that. But the walk gave me time to think and that is what I needed before I went to the funeral home to attend the visitation of a friend who had the ultrasound of his unborn daughter in the lid of his casket. That is how life works and sometimes it just isn't fair.
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| Tim & Kim Evans, Photo By Keelie Short |
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