A moment with the family

I carved pumpkins with my nephews tonight. The youngest, Dean, worked with his shirt off because, at two-years-old, the goop will inevitably crust to his clothes. Much easier to sponge off bare skin. Loftin, the oldest at four-years-old, is so changed from the last time I saw him: when his two-year-old brother was a baby in my arms.

I feel attached to these boys, but there is a sense of reluctance on my part because I don't want to have my heart broken again when I say goodbye. I came out to see them and get to know them, but I feel that there have been too many sad endings in life. My family always breaks my heart.

This morning was a mad rush to get the business proposal in before the noon deadline. I barely scraped by - and we'll see if this results in any good news. I could use some good news. My mother took time off work to spend the day with me - and I spent half the day huddled on the couch with my father's laptop, trying to recreate documents from my crashed PC, and get the right requirements in. My mom says, "I want to come work with you when you get your business going" and I look at her unsteady frame and grey pallor and wonder again (as I always wonder) how to get her healthy enough to go for a walk around the block with me. I can't bring her to Cameroon just yet.

Afterwards, I sat beside my father and we talked to J in Canada on speakerphone. Our first priority was to determine whether Lee was actually sober and drug-free. J seemed to think so. But J and G wanted to oust Lee from the program because having a suicidal 24-year-old is a liability nobody wants. Of course, Lee can't get any mental-health-care assistance until she is able to stay sober and, if we pull her from this program and plunk her into a $700-per-day residential treatment society designed to address borderline personality disorder, we will be 6 months as $120,000 into a program that might just as easily not work and which may not actually keep her sober. There are no good options for Lee right now. But the program may evict her anyway.

We drove into Emmigration Canyon, where the Brigham Young "This is the Place" monument stands and where Hogle zoo is hosting its Halloween celebrations. We ate salads at Ruth's Diner and worried about Lee.

I do not suppose there will ever come a time when my heart is not broken.