blamebrampton: 15th century woodcut of a hound (Default)
blamebrampton ([personal profile] blamebrampton) wrote2016-12-01 01:21 am

Oh …

My mother rang me early this morning.

This is a thing she does occasionally, usually when I am working regular hours, or when she has turned up unexpectedly in the same city as me and thinks we should eat together. But sometimes, as today, because someone has died. This time it was her brother, my uncle. A difficult man, who neither of us was close to and who we both ended up on speaking terms with only after a lot of patience on our parts and effort on his.

So it is that strange sort of thing where you are sad that someone has died, and that they did not seem to be able to make happy choices much of the time, but know that you can't in fairness take a week out to be miserable about the whole thing, because you don't have a week's worth of decent memories to sustain it.

But I do recall a thing he said the last time we saw each other: that he wouldn't want to see Donald Trump as president of the USA. I feel that – not for the first time, though almost certainly for the last – he's taken a perfectly understandable position to an illogical extreme.

[identity profile] mama-pyjama.livejournal.com 2016-11-30 02:30 pm (UTC)(link)
I didn't want to let let this pass unremarked. I am sorry for your loss, because even difficult people leave a hole in the fabric of your life. And your last line made me laugh, but also wince as it is also the sort of thing my difficult uncle would say...

[identity profile] blamebrampton.livejournal.com 2016-11-30 02:33 pm (UTC)(link)
Thanks, dear! I'm just pleased he got to do a few fun things in his final year and we had a few conversations that neither of us wanted to actively flee from. Ten years ago I would have sworn both would be impossible goals.