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I got a call today from my father telling me that his youngest brother, my uncle, died early this morning.  He lived alone and it looks like he had a seizure in the middle of the night.  He mentioned it with all the significance as if he was telling me that we were out of milk, so it took a second to register what he'd said.  In all the hindsight of 12 hours though, it seems appropriate.  How should someone sound when spreading that kind of news?  I'd rather hear it the way I did than have him try it with a phony emotional response or air of solemnity.  The truth is that they'd been estranged for several years ever since my uncle dove headfirst into alcoholism.

I'm from a family where we all sort of keep each other at an arm's length.  I usually don't hear from my siblings for months at a time.  I did have a clichéd kinship with my uncle stemming from how we were both misfits of our respective generations.  He used to tell me stories of seeing R.E.M. playing one of their first gigs after helping them pile out of a rusty van and on Christmas he would always send me mixed tapes he'd made of bands he'd liked in his youth.  While I loved him I know I don't want to end up like him.  Alcoholism aside, I don't want my best days to be my adolescence.  And while we all die alone, I'd like to not have lived alone.

It's funny, I never properly knew anyone who died in the first 25 years of my life, and this is the third since February.  It's not like I thought it would be; the crushing specter of mortality hasn't haunted my every waking moment.  I haven't cried or even spent much time thinking of them.  I guess my only concern has been my lack of a response.  Do I not care?  Am I a terrible person for focusing more on myself and my emotional state than the people who aren't here any longer?  Of course we can't ever really feel bad for anyone without using ourselves as a reference.  When I think someone else is "sad" the best I can do is imagine how I feel when I'm "sad" and assume that they have that going on inside their brain.  It's what sadism, masochism and altruism all have in common; we're only driven to do what makes us feel "good," "right" or "whole."  I don't think we can ever objectively care for other people but I'm going to live the rest of my life pretending that we can.  No matter how much I know that it's false, I won't live in a world that is that overtly hateful.