1963-2006

My uncle died two days ago. Liver cancer. Started out as cirrhosis (I believe that's the word), but that was years ago; just recently it became a malignant tumor, very sudden, and very inoperable. The man essentially didn't have any hope of getting a functional liver back.

My mother and I were there, along with my cousins, his wife and children, all crying, and eventually his brothers, who drove in eventually, not expecting him to go so soon. I'd seen this once before. My father. Four and a half years ago. Same disease. I recognized it. Yellow, unblinking, bloated eyes, set to jump from their sockets, bewildered yet unseeing, mindless. He was convulsing on the bed, straining the tubes going into him and the wires coming out, a slow motion dance macabre almost. My father didn't do that; he was still, but patients who die of liver disease tend to go into delirium right after their organ fails and toxins spill into their system, right before they die. His lips had shrivelled up until his mouth resembled nothing so much as that of a fish washed up on the beach and dried up in the sun. I touched his hand, his wrist; his skin had become thin and loose, the body underneath having disintegrated and deflated, like a balloon drained of air, barely enough left there on the bed to hang the paper-thin hospital garments from.

Eventually the doctors rushed in and forced everyone else out of the treatment room. When I finally went back in he was still, eyes closed at last, body no longer spasming, but he'd wrenched the plasma IV loose at some point. It had spilled across the sheets.

My dad's three remaining brothers went to sort out the paperwork then. The assembled family members scattered to take care of the aftermath. I sat in a chair in the hallway outside. I'd been there over two hours and barely spoken a single word. I had hugged my uncle's younger son, silently, when he was crying. Every word I could come up with seemed to have been crushed to bits under the immensity of the moment. Words to the dying man, words to his family--lost.

I had, effectively, for the second time in my life, watched a man die in front of me.

Of the same disease. In nearly the exact same way. The second time, I didn't cry. I suppose I was never that close to this uncle, but still.

I couldn't stop thinking: this is death. This is death. All you build up through your life, all you give your everything to become, everything is destroyed, through--this. It doesn't matter who or what you think you are. This is the total deconstruction of a human being. You can track every country on the face of the Earth. You can taste every wine of every vintage. You can fill your head with sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and textures, you can fill your head with all the wisdom there is, and this is what it will all become. You can take and take from the world, and learn and learn from the world, and hoarde and hoarde into yourself, you can fill yourself with all the wonders you can find--and it's nothing, at the end, it slides away like sand shifting on a wind-blown beach. If that's all you dedicate your life to--filling your eyes with stars until they glitter like kaleidoscopes, filling your ears with voices until they roar like the sea, this is all it's going to become.

So don't tell me, those people, who say they've no time to love, who say they can't spare any bit of their own lives, any portion of themselves to give to someone else. Don't tell me about individuality. They don't know. Most likely, you don't know. But it's something I can't look away from. Something I guess I haven't been able to take my off of for years, by now.

The fact: You will die, and if you don't love, sacrifice yourself, give some part of yourself away, all that you ever were and all that you ever will be will die with you.

In related news, my other uncle, the third brother in my dad's family, got a checkup after his brother died, and they found a 3.7cm tumor on his liver. It's not looking so good for livers in my family. It's not looking so good for me and the brew. I'm only 20, not 50, and I've had a few years' drinking instead of a few decades', but I'm starting to be rather worried.