All right, he hello, everyone. Welcome to it. It is the Derek Hunter podcast for the 10th of March 2022. I am back 2023. Good Lord. I am back as time. My father would have been upset that I took this long, but tough.

He deserved it and more. But yeah, so thank you for your patience. Appreciate you listening, downloading, sharing, telling a friend and all that good stuff and then kind notes and everything. Don't forget. I'll dress that in a second. Don't forget patreon.com slash Derek Hunter podcast or Derek Hunter dot locals dot com. There'll be the week and F and review up there. And you can enter to win either an autographed book by Dino Lash or Christy Nome. There. Five bucks a month is all we

ask to support the show. So appreciate that. That show will be up at midnight. All right, let's get started. But I do have to just address something before we get started. And I want to thank everybody. I can't. I could make sure I'm very big stickler for the proper word choice.

I'm not going to respond to everybody who sent me kind notes and things. My mother would be very upset. You know, you send thank you cards for everybody. My mother would have already sent thank you cards out for everything. It took me a couple months to get thank you cards out for the wedding. I just have never been that organized or that person. But

all the literally I don't know that I could. If I did nothing else for the next week, I probably could respond to all the messages. But I can't. And I can't. I didn't read them all. I saw them. I saw them. You can see the subject line. You can see the preview. Just don't. I don't want to read them. Denial. I'm going to stay in denial for as long as I can. And with a bit of rage.

And then just skip on into denial still. And I just don't have the

intestinal four to two to whatever to go through each one and respond to each one. I responded to some as they were coming in.

But I just they're the column that I wrote got a hundred thousand views. It's been I've been inundated to Facebook, Twitter, through emails and two or three different emails.

And everything. It's just I appreciate it. I am aware of it. I just can't focus on it. You know, I got to my dad would have been mad that I took a week. Tough. You know, tough. But it is not gone unnoticed. It is not unappreciated. It is just my coping mechanism. And you know, denial ain't just a river in Egypt. It's how I deal with a lot of things of this nature. It's not denial. Obviously you can't.

Deny it, but it is. It's one of those things you can't not think about but you don't need the reminders of but everything is a reminder of it and you want to not think about it. You're just looking for distractions and then you got to deal with certain things and dealing with it.

Thank God that I have three sisters and a brother who are older than me and expect very little from the baby in the family because they've handled everything.

My father of course set up everything ahead of time so that all that really needed to be everything was prepaid and it was all every all it needed to be done was a phone call.

And my sister who was with him made the phone call and everything was set in motion is like he said all the dominoes in motion.

He passed at his house in northern Michigan where he wanted to go. He did not. He was with my sister who's going up there for doctor's appointments and he did not.

He'd been unambiguous and talking to my brother that he didn't want to die in somebody's house. He didn't want to linger around and he didn't he was done.

He was in pain and discomfort, missed my mom and all that. And he'd met everybody in his family. He said it was everything that he'd done everything he wanted to do. He'd seen everything he wanted to see.

I did ask him if you know trying to give him something to look forward to about two months ago that you know what do you want to do you want to where do you want to go.

Like we can take a vacation and we can go somewhere. And the only thing he said was you know he wouldn't mind driving Route 66 to see the small the small town things and all the little things that are along there apparently you know it's been holding the Americana thing for forever.

He just was like of all the things that was it. So I was kind of planning that I didn't think he'd be up for that sitting in a car for extended periods of time.

But I was open to it if only just to give him something to look forward to to even talk about it. But they went up north to because he'd been down at my sisters because of the snow.

They got about a foot half a foot somewhere in there. He went up north to get ready for some doctors appointments that were supposed to take place this week.

And he was he was very, very tired. He'd been getting more and more tired. And he there was no point. He didn't want anything done.

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