Uncle Randy Died This Morning

I just got an email from my mom that my Uncle Randy died this morning at 10am. I guess he collapsed yesterday, and when he got to the hospital, they found he’d had a stroke and a brain anurizm. His condition was (is) stable, but they pronounced him brain-dead this morning.

I’m not sure how I should feel about this, or rather, I know how I should feel, but I don’t feel that way? It really hasn’t registered on me. I guess that has something to do with the fact that I barely knew Uncle Randy. He lived fairly far away, and we saw him once every 2 or 3 years at family gatherings. He was a sports writer for the paper in his town.

It really doesn’t affect me in any way. I feel bad saying that. It’s like finding out that a teacher I knew in high school died. You say “oh, wow, that’s sad…” and then proceed with eating your lunch or whatever. It doesn’t impact you unless you were close.

Should this have greater impact on me just because he’s family? About the only thought that registered was that I felt really bad for Aunt Beth (his wife), because their family’s already been through a lot of rough stuff in the past few months, and to add this on top of everything else seems really unfair. I know that they were all really close to him, so it will affect them a lot, and that makes me sad more than the somewhat abstract knowledge that someone died.

In The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, there’s a section that’s similar to how I’m feeling. Arthur Dent has just found out that the Earth was destroyed, and that fact is failing to sink into his head. It’s too big a thought to register properly. So he tries thinking of specific things. New York no longer exists. That doesn’t work, he never really believed in it anyway. London doesn’t exist. He gets a slight twinge. No more Elton John songs. A larger twinge. There is no longer any such thing as a McDonald’s hamburger, he thinks, and wakes up a minute later, curled into the fetal position and sobbing.

Hmmm. That joke was funnier when Douglas Adams told it, but I’m not feeling very funny right now, I was just trying to make the comparison about the thought failing to register. How can you really accept the idea that you will never see a person again? It’s too big an idea to absorb in one try.
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