weirdness week (the death part)

so this week started with some bad news…

…my uncle tim, dad’s youngest brother, had finally succumbed to his cocktail of parkinson’s/alzheimer’s/dementia.

and that’s sad.

he had been developmentally disabled his whole life, but only in an arrested development kind of way. the last real conversation with him i had he was in his fifties but sounded like a boozed up twenty-something. that ain’t a bad way to go. the positive to it all was this:

that’s dad in his first tattoo shop, which he was conveniently staying right across the street from. it wasn’t intentional – my stepmom jean, who booked his room, had no idea. dad had told me a different hotel, up the toll road about twenty minutes from the airport, so that’s where i took him. thirty minutes and ten bucks worth of tolls after we left the airport we were at the hotel in his text to me, which he just looked at and said, “that’s not it”. i replied, “bullshit – look at your text to me!” he then produced a piece of paper from jean that showed he was literally across the highway from the pflugerville atomic. like, if you sit at the front desk you are staring right at his hotel. so, rather than check, when we got over there he went and did some work crap with me, hung out with the guys, and got to car geek on the ferraris and audis next door at the wrap place. then it was dinner with my sister:

(the first pic was actually taken by a co-worker, but i thought it looked like i had just set the time and set my phone down, so i did that, sitting it on the bar at logan’s, and we got this one)

then he and i had a nice visit back at his hotel. i don’t mean to get overly mushy and shit, but you forget how much some family means to you until you actually spend a little time with them. this was THAT week for me with him. it’s nice to see his color back. it’s nice to see his spirit back. my dad is the oldest of three brothers and the last one standing, having had two hips replaced, beaten the cancer that killed his dad (prostate) and survived both kidneys running at less than three percent for half a decade and the subsequent kidney transplant that made that not a thing – and the transplant was only five weeks before this pic!

and the next day, we tried to put the “fun” back in “funeral” for uncle tim:

then we went to tres amigos, a family tradition from when i was a kid and i, for the first time in my life, bought my dad a nice meal with my own scratch (previously i’d always ended up charging it to the company i was working for at the time).

not a bad week at all.