Aftermath

My family lost three people to cancer in a very short time. My nephew Adam first from Ewing's Sarcoma a cancer of the soft tissue diagnosed at 15 and dying a week after his 18th birthday in 2010, my father to Renal cancer in 2013 being diagnosed in September of that year then dying by December and my nephew Aaron to the aftermath of it all.

You see Aaron was Adam's older brother, along with my son Jeremy the three of them had been inseparable from day one. Growing up together in a family this close cousin's become as close as siblings, sometimes even closer. They were together almost everyday all through their young lives thick as thieves and loyal to the bone. The stories I've written of their adventures together so far are only a drop in the bucket of the mischief they put us all through and they still make me laugh now just thinking about them. (Refer to my story "An Irish Mother.").

Adam was as strong as they come when it came down to it, never bitching or complaining about any of the problems or pain that came with the disease. Mentally he was stronger than any man I had ever met and he had a way of making you realize that no matter what was wrong in your life it didn't fucking matter. But Aaron being the older brother felt it all for him even after he was gone, so much so it had consumed him. Being Adam's protector he had nowhere to go with the rage and sorrow that weighed so much on his shoulders so he did what most of us would do and took it out on himself. As a young man Aaron had a quiet and shy demeanor but loved to be right in the mix with Adam and Jeremy making me aware that he was just as much the mastermind of some of the trouble they caused just as much as the other two. And boy did they love my father, Pee Paw they called him. He was a quiet man himself never saying a word unless he knew it would be relevant to the conversation, he always had a non- filtered Lucky Strike in between his lips letting it burn all the way down to the skin with the smoke rising up into one eye. My father adored them.

The combination of losing Adam and my father within a few years of each other was just to great for Aaron and Jeremy to bare but they had a great support system, but no matter how well any of us were there for them Aaron's heart was permanently destroyed and he was unrecognizable at times. He purchased a Hayabusa and rode it like he was invincible getting into several crashes, but surviving. He then tried bar fights until one night in a place known as the Oregon District here, a man finally stabbed him 17 times in the street leaving him scared and bloody. But to his dismay he survived again. This went on for years until a night in 2016 when he overdosed on an eight-ball and was now brain dead. Watching him lying in that dark hospital room unconscious and tubes in his throat I knew he finally got what he wanted when they pulled the plug. Although I had spoken with him several times about what he was doing to himself in the end it was his choice.

You can't fix people unless they want to be fixed, and believe me, most don't want to be. But you can be a shoulder to cry on, a sympathetic ear or just simply a friend. You tried your best.