This past week was long. There’s plenty happening in the world that is wearing on people, but in the course of one week, I had three viewings and four deaths to attend. And there was worse, which I’ll talk about here early this week.

In the picture above, you’ll see a woman holding a shirt from my Dad’s former band. Her name was Janet. She was friends with my parents, and a regular at my Dad’s shows. I knew her best from our Friday afternoon Happy Hours at Colonial Pizza in Easton. She was about as nice of a lady as you could meet. She left this world on September 5th. I had her viewing on Thursday night. I’ll miss shooting the shit with her on Friday’s.

On Tuesday night I joined what basically seemed like the entire Lehigh Valley at Tyler Weidner’s viewing. The line was ten minutes shy of three hours, and I didn’t get there until there was supposed to be 30 minutes left. Tyler’s family live up the street from us and he was a close friend of my cousin’s. The Easton fire fighter was a great guy in all the time I knew him, and his family are awesome people. He’ll be missed.

Everyone in the Easton area knew Zeke Bellis. If you didn’t like him, it’s because you didn’t get to know him well enough. He was a Palmer Township Supervisor, a youth football coach, and most importantly (weirdly), the beer man. Zeke could piss you off sometimes, but if you knew him, you knew he always meant for the best. Our community is worse off without him.

I wrote about the personal connection I had to former Moravian President and Air Force General Erv Rokke. The world lost him too. This guy lead an extraordinary life that took him to places like Moscow to represent America- as in he did some real shit. His service at Moravian quietly impacted things around the entire Lehigh Valley region though, and his voice was respected and heard on many, many matters in the Bethlehem community during his nine years as President.

This week was also 9/11, and we should never forget that. For those of us that lived through that day and were old enough to understand it, no other day compares in it’s impact on the world. We remember all of the lives lost that day, including Easton resident and Notre Dame High School Grad Colleen Supinski.

I’ll address one more death that hit me personally hard this week, and the Charlie Kirk murder. I just wanted to put out there that this was a long, long week not only for me, but for many of the people that I know to read this site. God is with you.