Schmoopy Me.

Today's been a semi-rough day. I mean...it's that space after a death where you are sort of contemplating life as you know it, where you are absorbing the reality of the fact that the person you love is no longer here, and for me its where I rationalize in my brain that death is a reality, and damn it, I should be a tidbit more calloused to it than I am after all I've witnessed, done and been through.

I mean...it's not like I'm a stranger to the whole death scene. I see it every day. I counsel the families I work with every single day on bereavement, and the great unknown. I know that I too someday will join the ranks of they who have crossed over, and yet...it feels so uneasy and un-understood.

Mom's death was the end all - be all of me. I am a completely different person today than I am the day before she died. I actually remember feeling the old me slip away during the three and a half hour drive that it took me to get from my house to hers. I felt the transformation.

Uncle Russ's death is different. Not worse, not better...just different. We knew it was coming. 6 days ago, he asked us to remove him from the morphine drip so that he could be coherent enough to talk with us and to say his goodbyes. He's been sick for a couple of months.

But...with mom's, hers was unexpected. Hers was not a shock, but THE shock of my life. And, despite the fact that they are two separate people, his death brings back hers. I mean, I deal with that a lot with the victims I work with too. Their deaths always have something similar, or something that ties me to their cases that I can relate to, which allows me to better serve the families I work with. But, I guess I didn't realize how calloused I had become with death lately. I mean, I feel for my families. I feel for their loss. I do my best to help them through it and to work from my experience with mom's death and the deaths of the other victims I've helped. But, with Uncle Russ...it was coming. Some would say it was a relief (I actually heard that said today) but, for me, it's not really a relief. It's a loss, no matter what way you slice it, or how much you candy coat it. He's gone, he's not coming back, and unlike a lot of the families I work with, I knew him before he got sick. I knew him before he withered away down to nothing. I knew him before the pain.

He used to give me piggy back rides on a dead run around his house. His house had a whole wall that was a waterfall in his livingroom. He used to come pick me up, and then we'd go pick up my cousin Chip, and we'd hang out all weekend at his house. He'd make us popcorn and rent the movies our parents wouldn't let us watch. The good scary ones. And, when we got all freaked out in the middle of the night, he'd be the one hiding around corners to scare the bejesus out of us, laugh like a madman and then tuck us back into our beds with extra stuffed animals for protection. He always had weiner dogs. Little tiny weiner dogs that were so horrifyingly irritating that you just wanted to kick them like a field goal to the next county, but instead got down on their level and played with them because it made Uncle Russ happy.

One Halloween, we all went out to my grandparents place. They own a house on a lake. Behind the house, just in front of the lake is a great big willow tree. All day long, Uncle Russ and Grandpa laid the groundwork for this ghost story that they would tell us after it got dark and we had started the bonfire.

The story was that there was an old Indian war-painted guy that wandered the properties of the people who lived on the lake because they had taken over his tribe's land. They told us that he had started to dress like a farmer to lure the property owners into believing that he was one of them so that he could get close enough to kill them and take back the property. The indian was dead, but didn't KNOW he was dead.

To me, at the age of 11, I was petrified. I was looking around corners before actually physically moving around them...it was scary stuff, man. Well...that night, we get the bonfire going under the old Willow, and Grandpa starts telling the story. He stops short in the middle of the story to ask where Uncle Russ is. None of us know. He makes a big deal about not getting separated from the rest of the family in case the old Indian guy was out there and already had Uncle Russ. Just as he finished that statement, we hear a whooping Indian war-cry. From up above we hear a scream, and a dummy, tied to a long bungy cord falls right into the center of the circle where Grandpa is telling the story and scares the living hell out of all of us. My little brother, LITERALLY peed his pants. Looking back, it was freakin' hillarious. At the time...not so much.

Anyway...I don't know. I'm just in that schmoopy mood where I know I'm gonna miss him. I'm sorry he's gone. I know he's out of pain now, which of course is awesome, but...it still leaves a big fat void in the lives of we who love him.

Hug yours tonight...

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