Seems there's been a lot of this lately...
I got a call from my Uncle in California that my Grand-dad, who was often a lot like Father to us boys growing up, was working in his garden today and collapsed. They called EMS but could not revive him.
Our family is in shock because other than the normal stuff that an 80+ year old suffers from, he wasn't in poor health. Making this harder for all of us is reliving losing my Mother in 2005 on May 3rd... and now on May 1st we lose my Grand-dad.
Christy always asks me during those "deep & thoughtful moments" about my favorite childhood memories - other than Disney trips, it always came up how Grand-dad would pick up my brother and I after school or on weekends and take us to the beach in his old white VW bug (we called it "Herbie") and we'd swim and run and play until nearly sunset, then he'd stop at the local A&W Drive-Inn on the way home to treat us to Root Beer Floats.
I was trying to make plans to squeeze out a trip that way sometime soon, simply because you just never know how much time you have in this world, and now it's too late.
We're scrambling to figure out how to get out there for services, but finacially it just looks kind of bleak.