Not To Be Trusted With Knives

August 19, 2010 by Beth

My uncle George died yesterday. Fucking cancer. He’s been sick for a while and we knew it was terminal, but I guess I didn’t realize that it would be terminal so soon, because I was shocked when my sister called to tell me. I can’t even imagine what my aunt and my cousin are going through, but I’m glad that we have a big family – I know they will have lots of support.

Other than me, all of both sides of my family live out east (either in Ontario or Quebec) and times like these I feel really disconnected. As I was telling my sister earlier, being so far away is hard. I don’t get to see family members when they are sick. And since I don’t see them often at all, it’s hard to really get that they are gone.  I mean, it’s been more than a year and a half since my granny died and I still feel like she’s going to be there when I go to Ontario.

When I think about my uncle George, I think of cribbage. When I was little, we’d go to visit my aunt Eileen, uncle George and my cousin Melissa and my uncle George and my dad would play cribbage.  Which I found endlessly fascinating.  I absolutely loved the way you counted out the points, “Fifteen – two, fifteen -four, fifteen – six , and a pair is eight.”  I had no idea what they were talking about – it sounded like they were talking in another language, but all the words were English! When I got older, they taught me how to play and it was great fun – there was even a thing where if you beat someone bad enough, you got to say you “skunked” them!  I really enjoyed playing cribbage with my dad and my uncle George  as a kid – it totally made me feel like I was a grown up!

My uncle George also had a really great sense of humour. And he was just a genuinely nice person.  I wish he’d lived longer than his fifty-something years.

Image Credit: Photo of a cribbage board posted by Peter Baer on Flickr.

Comments |2|

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.