So, my uncle died this last Tuesday night. He was 49. It turned out that he had leukemia since 1996. My family only found out about it a few years ago, and some people never knew at all until the end. Two weeks ago, he had a bone marrow transplant from an anonymous donor in Europe. Initially, he seemed to recover from it fine, but the anti-immune drugs they give you made him susceptible to a bacterial infection, which he couldn't fight off. I took the go train into Hamilton to see him before they turned off the respirator and to drive my aunt's car back to Toronto.

Some of you out there may remember him best as the guy who came to check up on us when we were staying at my grandmother's for that trip here in high school.

The past couple years since I've been living in Toronto Friday nights dinner have been in the company of my grandmother, my aunt and uncle and their two little kids. He could be a bit awkward in some ways and my awkwardness plus his awkwardness often added up to a whole lot of awkwardness. But he was the son who lived only a few blocks away from his mother to make sure that she could get groceries and get the refridgerator fixed, the guy who was the momentum in his social groups, pushing people together. My strongest memory of him for some reason was the couple of occasions when he took Rachel and I to the racetrack when we were quite little. For both my sister and I, this is a very powerful memory, but we're both at a loss to describe why it was so. Maybe it was the feeling of being exposed to a brand new world, a slight glimpse at a slightly seedier side of reality. Maybe it was the feeling of knowing that there was someone else, some one other than our parents who would do this for us, who had that same sense of responsibility for us, but manifested in entirely different ways. I don't know.

The past few days have been a flood of families, funerals and food. My uncle's family had been in the midst of renovation and they had all been staying at my grandmother's while the roof and the walls were put back onto their house. This meant everyone was cooped up in a single house, and with the tradition of sitting shiva, inside. It's times like this that really bring family dysfunctions to the forefront, although everyone has held it together fairly well considering.

I'm not sure how my grandmother's going to handle it. I'm not sure how my aunt and her kids are going to be.

We'll see what the next year brings for them.