I spoke with Beth, Colin’s ex-wife, she is not doing very well with all of this.  The poor woman has taken on so much of Colin’s baggage; even after his passing.  His wreckage will never be cleared away and that is very sad.  He will never know exactly how devastated people are over this.  I do no know all of Colin’s story, or at least the majority of his past from Ireland.  But I do know that he has family there that have arranged for his body to be delivered there.  He will not be having a funeral here.  He has left behind a dog, which he absolutely adored, and a very nice apartment full of very nice things.  His poor ex is almost forced to deal with the bulk of his wreckage here in Canada.  His family in Ireland don’t seem to be offering very much assistance to her.  I keep trying to put myself in their shoes and consider how they must be feeling after losing a son or a brother.

I’m starting to piece together what his life was like at his end.  He was on the verge of losing pretty much everything.  He lost his company, which if I read it correctly was pretty much his entire self worth.  He was very much a man that portrayed an image of wealth and consequence.  He liked nice things and made a bit of show about how much money he had.  I can vividly picture the days he was spending at home alone with the dog.  He would probably be spending his entire waking hours drinking and trying to deal with the fall out.  Beth was describing his health problems leading up to his death.  He had ulcers in his stomach and his throat and he was having seizures.  She said to me that she didn’t know why this was happening but that he was in and out of the hospital a few times to deal with those.  I’m doing the math on that and it all points to chronic and unrelenting consumption of alcohol.  I know this because it’s exactly where I was heading.  They say that a person can have up to five seizures while detoxing from alcohol, but the sixth one will usually have dire consequences.  I don’t know what Colin’s number was, but it proves that there is truth to the statement that seizures are deadly.  She had begged him numerous times to go back to treatment and to try again.  I always prayed that he would reach out sometime and ask for help.  I was hoping one day for the call that he was coming back to the rooms, not that he was dead.  I didn’t see that one coming with him.

People have said to me that they’ve had X number of people die in/around the rooms and that they know what I’m feeling.  But I haven’t and if fucking sucks. All I only know is that I had a friend who was living at the gates of hell and I wish he’d reached the same conclusion that I did.  That living like that is agony and it doesn’t have to be that way.  When I was in those same shoes I quickly realized that it was time to put down the shovel and stop digging my own grave.

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