Sorry I didn’t get around to replying to the comments about my netbook.  Yesterday was a bad day that started with battling Trojan horses on my parents’ computer, and it all went downhill from there.

We learned last night that my uncle is dying.  Advanced lung cancer.  There was some bleeding, and he was taken to the hospital in critical condition.  Now they’ve stopped the bleeding, and they’re sending him home to die, I think.  I don’t know all of the specifics, but it doesn’t look good.  “Three to four days” was tossed around last night.  The rest of the family is already talking about who’s going to pay for the funeral.

Me?  I’m trying to stay out of everybody’s way and to keep writing.  I’m writing a semi-silly scene about a pregnant man’s food cravings (a scene that will probably become Not Silly At All in a few hundred words), and the beginning of something completely different—and new.  I got the characters for the new thing when I woke up in the middle of the night with an idea in my head.  There’s not much more I can do than stay out of the way and offer a hug when I’m needed.

We’ve done this before.  I’ve already lost an uncle and an aunt to cancer in the past seven years.  My uncle died in Spring 2003, the second semester of my freshman year of high school, then my aunt died days before my graduation in ’06.  We’re at the “waiting for him to die” stage right now, because that’s all there is for us to do:  Wait for that phone call, the one we know is coming but always catches us by surprise.

Sometimes, I am glad that I am not close to any of my family besides my parents.  Not that there’s anyone to be close to:  My mother has a brother and a sister left, and the brother is dying.  My father has one brother left, and he’s in his seventies and has an aortic aneurysm that’s just waiting to go off—and the idiot is still doing things like buying a four-wheeler.  There are also assorted cousins on both sides, but I know none of them.  If you had a gun to my head and demanded that I name all of my first cousins, you’d have to shoot me.  I don’t know the names of my cousins.  I haven’t even met most of my cousins.  My family is made up of my mother, my father, and, reluctantly, Dad’s brother.  It is a lot easier to cope with all of their family dying when I don’t know any of them.

It also reminds me of how much it sucks to not have a family.  That’s why I hate holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas so much—they remind me more of what I don’t have than what I do have.  That’s why I didn’t celebrate Christmas last year, and that’s why I probably won’t celebrate it this year.  There’s no point.  I’m an atheist, and I don’t have much of a family.  Holidays in our house consist of special food, gifts, and our usual everyday activities.  They might as well not exist at all.

Other family-oriented events are similar.  No one came to my high school graduation but my parents, because there was no one I would’ve wanted there.  No one comes to celebrate our birthdays.  No one came to visit while Mom was in the hospital.  No one came to help us after the tornado.  Don’t other families do these things?  Celebrate during the good times and support during the bad ones?

At least I have some amazing friends.  My parents don’t even have that.

I suspect this is why I’m so fascinated by families and very close friendships in my writing these days, and why I keep trying to have a variety of them.  I have characters who have no one, I have characters who have no one who’s worth having, I have characters with big families, small families, and friendships that are their families.  I have characters who have kids, characters who hate kids, characters who are kids.  I have families that are as dysfunctional as mine and families that make me wish so hard for what I don’t have.

Everybody comes from somewhere, and we don’t always like where.  Since I’ve started seriously writing, I always try to remember that.  Where we come from reverberates through us from the day we’re born until the day we die.  Our past shapes our present and our future, our childhood shapes our adulthood, our relatives shape our relationships.  Does any outside influence affect us as completely as the state of our family?  Events don’t affect us until they happen.  Environment changes.  But family shapes us from the beginning and touches everything.  We can try to escape it, but we can’t erase it.  We can change how we behave, think, and live, but we can’t remove our family from our history.  Embracing or escaping it is just another one of its effects.

So, I’m writing.  There’s not much else to do.  More than likely, we aren’t going to visit my uncle one last time, and if we did, I wouldn’t go anyway.  One one-last-visit to a dying family member I barely knew is enough for me in this lifetime, thanks.

It would be nice if the tragedies left us alone for a few decades now, but they won’t…At least they make good story fodder?