This is kind of a heavy post. Now's your chance to back out.

Today I went to visit an uncle in the hospital. For a long while he's had various medical issues, including diabetes. Recently he was going through a particularly rough patch, but I guess everyone chalked it up to his health problems that they were already aware of. But as things started to get worse, they did more tests, and it turns out that on top of everything else, he's got kidney cancer. By the time they figured this out, he was already in Stage 4 and the cancer had spread to his lungs.

I'm trying to be hopeful, but the outlook isn't great. For all I know, I might have seen him for the last time today, and it all has me feeling very fucked up. I haven't cried, which is weird, because I cry all the time. I get misty if there's a cute dog or cat in a commercial lol. But I have this weird way of detaching myself from the big things, probably as a defense mechanism against the feelings of depression I'm often prone to.

Mostly I'm mad. Mad at fate, the world, God(?), whatever. My uncle's a good guy-- better than most, and it seems like he's had more than his share of hardship. This is a guy who studied to become a priest, and even though he didn't continue on that path, he gave it up for no less noble a career than that of a teacher. In New York he taught inner city "trouble" children, and back here in Massachusetts he taught kids with disabilities. Not just anyone can do that. It takes a special kind of person. He and his wife tried for a child of their own, but after a lot of attempts, and one child who was born too weak to survive more than three days, they gave up on a biological child and adopted a little girl from China. She's a teenager now, and has to face the possibility of losing the only dad she's ever known. And it just doesn't seem fair.

Back in the late '80s, when I was a teenager, I developed an interest in playing the drums. My uncle had been a jazz drummer, but wasn't really playing much at the time, so he lent me his drum set indefinitely. Along with a couple of friends, I used it to record my first-ever official song in 1988. Is it a great song? No. It's a very crude lo-fi recording made by three kids with little (if any) true talent, and is arguably only of interest to the musically-masochistic. But do I love it in a weird way? Fuck yes, I do. It was my start in songwriting and recording, and it wouldn't have been possible without my Uncle Frank.

I used to see my uncle pretty regularly at family gatherings, but starting around the beginning of the '90s, two things happened that changed that. The first was my parents' divorce, which somewhat distanced me from my father, and by extension, the rest of his family. The second was when my grandmother started to go downhill mentally. My dad wanted her to continue living at home, under family supervision, while his siblings thought that it would be better for her to go to an assisted-living facility. My dad was outvoted, and it caused a rift between him and his brothers and sister. Between those two events, I was no longer going to most of the family gatherings, and so over the last 15-20 years, I've only seen my uncle a handful of times. This situation had started to improve some within the last few years, thanks to a cousin who has taken the initiative in getting everyone back together, but I still feel like I've been robbed of a lot of time with him.

I don't know what point I'm trying to make. Mostly I'm just venting, and while I feel like I could do that for a lot longer, I'd just be repeating variations on the same theme: I don't get it. I just don't get it.