Goodbye, Uncle Tom

My Uncle Tom and Aunt Swannee

This afternoon, my Uncle Tom died.

He was diagnosed with Leukemia late last year and struggled through the chemo and the various infections for months, eventually ending up with a staph infection in his blood that kept him from being able to get the chemo he needed to stay alive. I’ve known other people who died from cancer – one of my dad’s brothers in the last year had pancreatic cancer – but I’ve never seen anyone linger so briefly. On Monday, my parents brought him an Uncle Hershel’s breakfast from Cracker Barrel. He scarfed it down and ate half of my aunt’s plate, too. Last night, he could barely be spoon-fed. Today, he is gone.

Uncle Tom’s sole hope was that the chemo could  knock out the cancer just long enough for him to make a trip to Vanderbilt for an experimental stem cell treatment. But every time they did a (very painful) spinal tap, there would be too much cancer still there. Earlier this week, the doctors announced that without more chemo, he had less than two weeks to live, but because of a combo of pneumonia and a staph infection in his blood, the needed chemo would also kill him. Yesterday they switched from antibiotics to morphene. There was nothing more they could do. I visited him last night at the hospital down the street and had planned to come by with Katie today, but that didn’t happen.

To say that the whole thing seems unfair would be both an understatement and irrelevant. I never was as close to my Uncle as my granddad would’ve liked (check out the pictures below from my wedding, where I phtoshopped Tom out for a more perfect wedding memory). But I completely took him for granted. Simply put, he should still be here, living a few blocks from Katie’s sister. I should be trying to avoid going to his house for Christmas Eve this year, like every year, a family tradition since I was a child.

My Uncle was the last remaining connection my mom had to the family she grew up with (although she does have some cousins). My granddad, who was completely blind for most of his life, was the last of my grandparents to die. That was 2003. He was 92. My uncle outlived his father by 6 years. He was 65.