For dust you are and to dust you shall return; only not the soul

I don't know how to start this, I have started it three or four times, that fact is that for once I don't know what to say. I feel rather at a loss, I suppose I should be crying or grieving in some way. Years ago there would have been weeping and gnashing of teeth, sack cloth and ashes and now... are we so removed from life that death simply does not affect us. Have I become hard hearted and changed so by society that the death of a member of my family effects me is such a way? You see I am not crying I am not throwing myself on the floor in terrible grief I am not sitting Shiva. That fact is I don't know what to feel, or how to feel, or if I am feeling. I feel so very empty and confused.

Perhaps I should digress in order to explain the present.

My Aunt is Korean, she was adopted when she was a toddler and though this might sound like an oddway to start off it makes sense in my head. I never knew growing up that she was different. I didn't see her almond shaped eyes and olive skin as different, all I knew was that she was my aunt. As children we are ignorant in in that ignorance perhaps there is truth in the old saying ignorance is bliss, for we do not know the things that change the way we look at people, all we see is the person.

Later you learn things, unsavory things and you no longer see the world through rose colored glasses. My Aunt was not lucky in love, her first husband was abusive to her, but she got two beautiful daughters out of it. Her second husband attempted to kill her and made her miserable, and changed her in a way. She got nothing out of that one. Then she found Tom. He was sweet, kind, his family became her family, her family became his. Her grandchildren called him Pop Pop and to them that is just what he was. He was at every Christmas gathering and so were his relatives, and it was just excepted as normal because Tom fit. Aunt Donna didn't cook, but that was ok because Tom did, and man did he make one mean pecan pie! Tom was a good man, and my aunt had finally found love; real love, with a man who treated her like she was his world and she did likewise. She found the love of her life the man who made her happy.

My aunt is a good woman, if it weren't for her, my father would be taking on caring for his mother alone (besides us of course). She is there for family, she carried on the traditions her parents taught her and tried to hold on to family gatherings long after we had all come apart. So perhaps what I am feeling most right now is a sense of complete unfairness.

At 9:30pm my cousin called to tell me my Aunt's husband, her stepfather, my Uncle had died.

It is with that same suddenness in which I presented it to you, that we all took it in. It was to soon, not that we hadn't expected it someday soon, but not yet. He was given months, not weeks.

Not but a month ago, we were introduced to the news of immenance about my Uncle. He had a tooth abcess, and was sick, they thought he had a heart attack, but it was really an infection of the heart caused by the tooth. Just a little while later he had trouble swallowing. This was a man who was not often sick, who was vibrant, and always ready with a smile. It was discovered that he couldn't swallow because he had esophogial cancer, and what was more, there had been no symptoms and the cancer had already spread. It had spread through his body and had infested it so much so that it was as if hope was taken away as quickly as the breath pounded from your lungs.

My Aunt turned to family, and for the first time in many years, she looked to the faith that was instilled in her by her parents. She asked my father, her big brother to pray for them. She wanted a miracle... so did we all. We went and we prayed, we laid hands on him, we had a spark of hope, a flash of faith, a chance that this would not be so completely unfair, but that God would use this to bring them both to him, and give them the life-saving miracle we all dreamed of.

But he didn't
I don't know why, but he didn't.

Tom went into the hospital, he was losing so much wieght, his friendly mustache was gone, and so was his smile. They tried chemo, but it wasn't to be had. He went into hospice care, and was sent home. We thought they had months, that he had months, that their time together would not be cut so terribly short. But it was.

I don't understand, and perhaps that is what I feel, a lack of understanding, and a deep pit of unfairness eating away at my stomache, gouging a hole with a shovel made of questions.