A Truth I Once Told my Brother-in-Law

My next-to next-to last Brother-in-Law once told me this story. You'll need a little background information to understand the whole thing.

My older sister and her then husband once worked for a couple of friends who ran a business called TableTenders. TableTenders was a company that supplied servers for banquets. If you were a caterer and you had an event and you needed people to take care of serving the food and picking up afterward, you called TableTenders. They were sub-contractors who helped caterers serve the food.

A friend of my sister's then husband (MSTH) worked for the company too. She was suddenly in huge financial trouble. Her husband, a KCMO Firefighter decided to divorce her. He left her and the home and he left her to fend with their three children. Suddenly she was living hand to mouth with her kids and didn't know what to do next.

This went on for a while, certainly long enough that she was in emotional and financial distress and he bought a big motorcycle.

One day, the Firefighter was out on his bike, lost control, and hit a wall. He was killed instantly. What he hadn't done though is finish the divorce proceedings. All of their property was now her property. She was the recipient of his insurance and pension too because he didn't change any of the paperwork.

As this was happening, one of the owners of TableTenders was selling their half of the business. She took the proceeds of the insurance and bought half of the business. Suddenly this woman went from living on the edge to becoming an entrepreneur. She went from being economically marginal to being a small business owner.

So, MSTH asked, "Paul, help me out here. What's the moral of this story."

I told him "The moral of this story is not for her, and it's not for him, it's for you and me: We will all have mid-life crises, we must handle them better than this."

Friends, we must all do it better than this.