passing

LINK: passing

My brother texted me to let me know that my step-uncle had passed away.

I never met him before. I was never told his name.

When I was a child, there were family gatherings, and my cousins and I would gossip about this uncle amongst ourselves. How come we never met him? What’s wrong with him? What happened? As we got older, we asked our parents and they told us that it didn’t concern us. I thought to myself, “How could family not concern us? Couldn’t we at least see him?”

He was the son of my step-grandmother. Grandfather married her shortly after his first wife (my father’s mother) died from cancer. My grandfather and his second wife were a bit of a mystery. They both became unalived when I was a child so I don’t have memories of them. My grandfather died from a myocardial infarction and my step-grandmother…I have no idea. Not much was said about our “step” family.

One of my uncles told me that whenever he and his siblings went to visit him, teardrops would fall from his eyes. He couldn’t talk, just cry quietly. My half-uncle was born much later than his half-siblings. I guess you could say that my grandparents had healthy sexual appetites despite being in their golden years? He had severe developmental and intellectual disabilities and since both his parents passed away, he was placed into a skilled nursing facility for ongoing care.

It’s almost unheard of to not take care of your own, so I can’t say what happened in this situation.

I don’t know if he was in the U.S. or in the motherland. I know nothing of his funeral. I know nothing…but I do feel a twinge of sadness because he was still our blood relative and he was alone for so long…