Life is uncertain

Sometimes, it takes a little while to wrap one's head around an unexpected death. That happened to me yesterday.

A couple of times in the past, we've worked with a mortgage broker who's about our age, named Alec. He really helped to bail us out when we hit some snags with the sale of our townhouse in Burnsville and the purchase of our house in Lakeville back in 2001. I had last traded messages with him about mortgages about a year and a half ago, I think.

I wanted to refer someone to him while I was home yesterday, but the contact information was at my office. I decided to just Google his name so that I could get his contact information that way. I was shocked when the first thing that popped up in my search was Alec's obituary. He was diagnosed with lymphoma in June of 2010. In December, he was deemed to be in remission, but just a month later, he died of a rare complication caused by the treatment. He had four kids, ages 14 and under.

It's not like Alec and I were great friends or anything. Other than time we spent on mortgages, I didn't really keep in touch with him. Still, it caught me a bit off guard. I had this mental picture of us working with Alec as we arranged things for getting a house when we move back to Minnesota. My mental picture got jarred.

I don't have any profound observations other than the obvious: life is uncertain.