From a distance, it shouldn't have been much of a surprise, and while sad, it's not totally out of the question.
In a world where events conspire to create great tragedy every day, where conflict rages and we seem at war even with ourselves, with the innocent and the arbitrarily unfortunate, it was almost mundane. Somewhat predictable.
A man in his mid-70s works in his yard in the Oklahoma heat and collapses in his kitchen. Paramedics try valiantly, but he later passes, surrounded by his wife of more than 50 years and his children and grandchildren.
Actuarial tables might even have predicted it. The numbers say it wasn't a surprise.
But that's from a distance. And we don't always have the good fortune to live from a distance. Sometimes we're right there, or at least a phone call early one morning away. And then, up close, it's something else.
My sister's husband passed away last week. And I'm still trying to sort that out.
On the one hand, it's tragic but inevitable. We age. Things change. The young and vibrant become older and ... less so. No one gets out of this alive. At least that's what we acknowledge.
At some point life becomes a matter of beating the clock and the odds and those tables and our own expectations. We all have a number in mind, even if we don't necessarily admit it and if it changes the closer we get to it.
So from the safe vantage point of that distance, viewed in the abstract and with no connection to the participants, well, this shouldn't be that hard to believe.
But it is hard. And hard to believe.
They had known each other since high school and married in their early 20s, so in effect, there had never been a time in my life when my sister and her husband weren't together. When it wasn't "Jan and Mike."
However, since my father was in the Air Force, there was never a time when I lived near them. My sister is 12 years older than I am, so we shared the briefest of actual time together and then years of knowing we were both out there somewhere, connected by the occasional visits and cards and letters and, ironically, family funerals.
My relationship with my sister has actually grown closer as we grew older and began to connect through our similar, if not literally, shared experiences. We both were dealing with kids and spouses and work and aging parents and all the things we suddenly had in common that we didn't have when I was 6 and all I knew of her was she was leaving for college and didn't have time to play cards with me.
And Mike, well, he may have been at the center of their lives, but he was floating on the edge of my connection with Jan. He was at work. Or picking up the kids. Or doing something in the backyard. He was there, somewhere.
At his memorial service my sister noted that she'd had a hard time finding pictures of him with her and their children, and then she realized why. He was always taking the picture.
He was always there, taking care of things. Taking my father and then my mother to their appointments. Taking care of the arrangements when first my dad and then my mom died. Taking care of things.
And now he'll always be there, still floating on that edge. But now it's my sister's new life on her own. And for the first time in some time, almost as long as I've been alive, it won't be "Jan and Mike."
It's going to be tough to get used to that.
In the abstract, from a distance, it's not hard to believe. A man in his mid-70s had a heart attack and died. Unfortunate, but inevitable. It happens every day.
But when you get closer, it's a different thing.