I wasn’t there when they said the words bone cancer but you could see the syllables still echoing in his mind when he talked. He was always a plain spoken man, known for mumbling but always getting his point across by staring in your eyes until he saw understanding spread across your face.

I both feared and loved my uncle throughout my childhood. My mother is the youngest of three sisters and there is almost three decades between her and the next youngest sister. Imagine being twenty five years old, married with children of your own, and finding out that your mother is pregnant with a new sibling. We have an interesting family dynamic where my grandfather and grandmother were like my mother’s grandparents and her sisters and brother-in-laws were like her parents. And my aunts and uncles were like my grandparents and my cousins were like my aunts and uncles.

Like I said, an interesting family dynamic.

But we made it work and my two uncles were the absolute pillars of strength in our family. If something needed fixed, they were the ones who fixed it. If someone needed taught how to drive, they were the ones who taught them. Every odd job. Every even job. The hustle that makes a family function financially. These were my uncles and I was born into the world under the protection of their umbrella.

And the words the doctor told my uncle hurt him worse than the cancer, I think. They were too final, too certain. My uncles live in a world of certainty and when words are spoken with certainty to them, syllables plummet to the ground like bodies falling to the concrete from the hundreth floor, they could go down with the weight of it all.

It was one of those times when you wish thank you and I love you were enough to flood out the free radicals, irradiate all the metastasized cells gone insane and rambling in the marrow.

I can’t make poetry out of pain like this.

Creative Commons License photo credit: cobalt123

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