So two days ago it was my birthday. Which in recent times that’s been a pretty rough thing for me to go through. I guess it’s because a few years ago I spent my birthday as a pallbearer for my grandmother’s funeral and the last thing approximating physical contact with her was carrying her casket to the graveside. Since then I’ve never been able to fully dis-associate birthdays from funerals, life from death. And my grandmother and I had been close, too.

There have been times that it hasn’t been so bad though. The following year after her funeral, during the first year of our relationship, Lisa went far in giving me a fun, upbeat, positive birthday. That included going to Olympic Park in Atlanta, then meeting up with my life-long best friend Chad where he worked at the CNN Building and he showed us around to a lot ...