I’m home visitng my uncle this weekend, while he’s still visitable. At this point he’s pretty jaundiced, and he feels nauseous all the time. His inability to eat much and his illness have meant that he’s lost a lot of muscle mass, although apparently swelling and water retention to keep his weight about the same. And he’s tired more, which I think affects his ability to keep his eyelid over the false eye open, or maybe it’s the weight loss that made it droop like that. Anyway, he looked pretty close to normal, or at least he didn’t look terribly sick. He looked like he was just recovering from the flu, say. Kind of yellow-green, and a little thinner around the face, and a little unsteady, and not as funny, but overall he looks about ok. And he ate plenty at dinner tonight, which was good, although I couldn’t tell if he was doing it just to make us happy or because the acupuncture actually started helping make things palatable again.
I’ve always admired my uncle. When I was little I thought he was cool because he was a race car driver. When I was older and understood the difference between running a race-car team and being a driver, I admired him for his leadership, his incredibly sarcastic wit, and his incredibly deep knowledge of odd subjects: military history, auto racing, economics, dogs, money laundering (as a retailer of extremely-high-end auto parts, he had occasional clients who came to him with bags of cash). I admired him for having dropped out of college and taught himself everything he knew, and for starting two successful businesses, and did I mention the incredibly sarcastic wit? He and my father were quite a pair in a political discussion, burning everything that came into view.
I can tell how bad things are by the way my grandmother acts– if I call and she’s off the phone in under fifteen minutes, she’s really feeling poorly. If you get her going, she’ll usually take you on a random walk through the mid-20th-century, with detours through fifteenth and sixteenth century printmaking, colonial-period philosophy, and University of Virginia interdepartmental politics. But these days it’s “I’m busy I’m tired I gotta run.” And that worries me.
The super bowl should be amusing, anyway. By which I mean, it’ll be more fodder for that ongoing essay I’ve been meaning to write on the nature of masculinity, suffering, and family.
Secretly Ironic 