Have you ever gone to an airport to pick up somebody you didn’t know?

Or, perhaps, somebody you had met once, but hadn’t seen in a while?

I did this, nearly twenty years ago. It was a couple days before my wedding and I was nominated / volunteered to pick up my fiancee’s brother. My future brother in law.

He called and said he was coming to the wedding, which was a little odd because hardly anybody had seen him in twenty years. I met his son and his ex-wife, in fact, before I met him. Lucky for me, he looked kinda like his dad, so I was able to spot him easily at the airport. That and the fact that the place was just about closed for the day (he must have been on one of the last flights, if I recall he phoned the house when he arrived and this was LONG before cell phones) – he was practically the only person waiting.

Anyway, why do I bring this up, do you ask?

Because that was a long time ago (nearly twenty years, you might recall, back in paragraph three I said this), nobody has heard much from him since, and last night another of my wife’s brothers called and said he had passed away. If I have the story right, he was on dialysis and picked up a respiratory infection in the hospital that did him in. Somebody going through his things found his son’s name and location and a trooper showed up at the door yesterday bearing the bad news.

So, um, yeah.

This is the second sibling in three months, both to a respiratory infection caught while in the hospital. Damn. That’s not good.

My wife told our kids this morning (obviously, they have no clue who he is) and one of my boys was in tears at the thought of her leaving town for a while to go to the service. My oldest, though, was thinking “Oh, yeah, dad’s in charge. Ice cream for dinner!”

Happy new year.