I'd like to tell you all about my family. Specifically, my mother, father, and sister. All three of them good Christians, good people. Regular churchgoers, charitable....nice people.
My sister got married a few years ago, to a guy from the church, and soon after was pregnant. Twins. On the day they were born, there were big complications. Everyone at the church prayed for them.
The next day, she died. I'm not sure she even got the chance to hold her babies.
The husband moved away, and soon after remarried - either a lady vicar or lay preacher, I can't recall. With two sets of grandparents in their own family, there was no room for my mum and dad. Pretty soon they were cut off from my sister's children.
They took it all very badly, and its likely this double whammy was what set off my mother's Alzheimers. Over the last couple years she has got worse, to the stage now where she looks at me and will say "I really wish I'd had children - I never did, you know".
Last Monday my father went into hospital, complications with his medicines. On about 20 pills a day for various things, he wasn't right since my sister's death, except it hit him physically, and his health deteriorated over the last couple years. Caring for my mum took it out of him as well, but he hid her illness from me. Only this summer, when he had the first of four hospital stays and mum stayed with us was it clear how bad she'd got. I started getting social services involved, but the wheels grind slowly. This latest visit, they found a great respite care home while he is in hospital - she needs someone around her all the time now. My wife and I have to both work, we can't do it.
My dad....again, I'm sure everyone was praying for him. Yesterday morning he died, basically just worn out. He was 75. It all happened very fast - between the hospital calling to say "better come today" and calling to say "he's gone" was about 45 minutes. I was sorting out childcare and my wife was on her way back from work with the car.
My mum doesn't know yet. Tomorrow I have to collect her and tell her and take her to the Chapel of Rest to see him. With her Alzheimer's, it may well be that she hears that her husband of 45+ years is dead, over and over again as she forgets, and asks for him, and has the news broken again.
My sister, my mother, my father. All good Christians, all good people, with their church praying for them all.
Life stinks. I am so, so glad that there is no god. Because a god that would do all that.....
That's all.