halstingdon

this week has sucked. on monday morning my uncle passed away. he had a very difficult life and by the end he was in so much pain. i think it's good that he's gone for that reason because his pain is finally over, but i'll be damned if i don't miss him. the thing is, when he was alive, i barely even knew him. when i was a kid, he has lots of problems with alcohol and he was rarely around. he would show up at holidays, and i remember him kind of smelling funny from the bar he just came from. but that didn't matter to me at all, because he was always nice to me and made me laugh. and it sucks because i only saw him 3 or 4 times a year, but i always liked having him around. i was real young back then, so i didn't really understand why he wasn't there all the time, and what alcoholism even meant, but i knew that i loved my uncle joe. and about 6 years ago he had a stroke and had to be placed in a nursing home to be cared for at all times. I hated visiting him there. i hated it so much. he was not who i remember. he was paralyzed on the left side of his body and he couldn't really move all that much. he had trouble talking and he didn't remember things all that well. and when i went to see him for the first time after his stroke, i walked in the room and saw him lying there in the bed and i refused to believe it was him. i hadn't seen him in well over a year at this point and the moment he saw me he started crying. which of course made me cry. but after a couple years, things were starting to look up. his condition was improving, and then bam, another stroke. it wasn't too long after that that he passed. i heard about it monday morning and it didn't affect me much. i tried not to think about it at all. just pushed it back in my mind. but today, when i got to the wake, i saw him and i didn't even recognize him. he looked nothing like the man i remembered. and when i finally went up to pay my respects, i just lost it. i didn't really know him all that well, but i know he loved me, and i know i loved him.