Renee Roissier Miller

June started with a trip to Ocean City, the town where I grew up and began my life with Renee. The beach town will always hold a special place for me, I remember my youth fondly and am thrilled see the next generation enjoy the area as much as I did. Overall the trip was a huge success. We got to see many friends and family plus we enjoyed really great weather. I think the kids got their fill of the beach, seafood, fishing, crabbing, boating and spending time with their cousins. Their aunts went above and beyond to see all the kids had a good time. I got to spend time with people very dear to me who have been a great help as I begin my journey of a life without Renee. For the most part I did pretty well though there were a couple of times when the memories hit me like an avalanche, overwhelmed me and left me in a total funk. Simple things like sitting on a friend’s deck by a river drinking beer when it occurred to me, in the hundred or so previous times being here, I had never been without my Renee. In previous conversations Renee and I had with these same friends of growing old gracefully after the kids were raised and gone, we talked of us literally “sitting on a dock on the bay” eating crabs, cooking out and drinking a few beers. These memories flooded my thoughts and rendered me pretty poor company for a time. I snapped out of it, after a while. I did end up staying on the shore a day longer than scheduled, gave the kids another day on the water and me some time to reflect and make some future plans. Not sure if these moments come less frequently now or I just handle them better, but even with the raw emotions this trip was better than last years. Either way life does go on but it can be damned hard at times. I recently read and it certainly rings true, “time doesn’t heal anything, it simply passes and drags you with it.” That pretty much sums it up. My kids need me in the present so that is where I try to dwell, at least most of the time. I do have some changes and decisions coming up about how I am going to spend the rest of my life and continue dealing with the damage inflicted upon my children by the monster who stole their mother. It’s been a long road and a lot of people have helped me keep going when I really wasn’t sure I would.

Summer at home is busy, working with the kids and trying to keep the place up takes a lot of time. Rental houses are still a struggle to manage and we sure aren’t seeing any improvement in the economy around here, at least not in my tenants’ demographic. The kids have been spending quite a bit of time at a local pool and we get to the lakes and rivers in Tennessee often. Unusually warm and sunny weather has given the kids tans dark enough to question their ancestry but they do look fit and healthy. Overall the kids are doing a bit better, still a lot of work to do but certainly not all bad news. A legal update will be posted in a day or two. July 1st found me spending all day in a courtroom, watching a defense attorney attempt to pervert the justice system, looking for a loophole for his guilty client to slither through. On this day at least, he was not successful. More detail to follow. To those who care, thanks.

Be well.-
jamie