...BUT GOD!

Hey you guys. I hope things have been good with everyone. I've been a little down these past couple of months, but God is bringing me back to like; He's breathing into these dry bones of mine, so I know I'll live again.

My uncle, who was living with me for the past 9 months passed away on July 31st. He was 51, but had lived his life in a bottle. There were times when he didn’t have money for booze, so he’d drink rubbing alcohol instead; that monkey on his back needed to be fed.

Oh,the life of an alcoholic; the bumps and bruises; the cuts and scars…internal and external. My uncle was a DIE-HARD-HOLIC! He lived (for the funk, die for the funk – sorry), but he loved him some liquor and his mother loved her some him. My uncle was my grandmother’s baby-boy. He wasn’t the youngest child, but the youngest son and the neediest. He was spoiled rotten to the core (I’m not speaking ill of the dead, but telling the truth of things). He expected everyone to tolerate his antics, no matter how intolerable; he was a drunk and it wasn’t his fault he loved the booze so much, so he said, so we were expected to grin and bare all of his drama.

He lived with my grandmother all his life, until she decided to move into an independent living home for seniors. He spent a couple of years going from rehab to rehab just to have a place to lay his head when he wasn’t laying it on a street curb. He’d go to visit my grandmother everyday and disturb the entire community, so they banned him from the establishment. My grandmother had enabled him for so long that she owed him the rest of her life.

My uncle’s death was tragic, but expected…my grandmother’s wasn’t. The day after my uncle died my grandmother made herself busy with his funeral arrangements with most of the family in and out of her small apartment. “We need more chicken!” she said to my aunt who was charged with food-shopping for all the visitors. Since I was my grandmother’s favorite grandchild (her words not mine) and since she was my rock, I planned to stay the night with her. With the guest all gone and the phone quiet, she spent the remainder of the evening trying to fix the DVD player (I wanted us to watch a movie and as the favorite, I always got my way).

“You know I don’t let things get the better of me; so I’m not going to bed until this thing is working,” she said as she fiddled a little harder. Ten minutes later the DVD player was working and my grandmother was off to bed. Somewhere in the middle of the night she had a massive stroke and died in the hospital the next day…taking a million pieces of me with her…oh, but God!