A Death in the Family

Newsletter 2019-09-15

In the last email, I told you how our minivan died on the Interstate and we thought our oldest daughter ran away because she was mad at us. But there was one other unfortunate event I deliberately left out: My grandma died. We spent this weekend in Iowa for her funeral.

Death is a touchy subject. That might be the understatement of the century. I’ve posted jokes on Twitter every day since August 2012. That’s more than 2,500 days in a row. Not all of those days have been good days. There have been personal disappointments and national tragedies and everything in between. On all of those days, I searched for those brief moments of laughter I could distill down to a simple tweet and share with the world, even if those 280 characters were the only bright spot I could find. That’s what I’m going to do now, but with considerably more words since my email provider was kind enough not to give me a character limit. Consider this email to be the eulogy I would have given at my grandma’s funeral …