| | my cousin Leslie
died yesterday. he'd been fighting cancer for as long as i can
remember, and after many victories he lost. it's weird how the
world works. you see Leslie and i were never close. he was
in his mid 40s with a family and worked as a lawyer for the army.
the army life style combined with the best cancer treatment in the
country meant that they moved around a fair bit, so long story
short-ish i hadn't seen him or his family for about ten years or
so. then last year he and his wife came to chicago for a long
weekend and i, being the residential chicago relative, got to spend a
fair bit of time with them one on one. then i ran into them again
at my uncle's (his father's) retirement gala. after an extremely
long time of knowing i had a cousin named Leslie, but not actually
knowing him, i was given the chance to get to know him as an
adult. he was a great guy. easy to talk to, funny, honest,
and one of those people who seems genuinly interested in what you have
to say.
the family as a
whole is of course sad, but in some ways there is a sort of
relief. everyone has known that Leslie would have rough times
with the cancer and would almost inevitably die from it at some
point. it was always a question of when. no one knew when
it would get really bad again, so it was always sort of hovering over
them. he has two daughters. the younger one is in middle
school. she was born after her dad was diagnosed. she's
never known a father without cancer.
i'm very lucky
to have spent some time with him more recently. it struck me this
morning how young he really was. i guess i always think of death as in
the far future. my gramma for example was nearly ninty when she
died last year. i forget that it could really happen to
anyone. this hit me this morning when i was realizing that Leslie
was about the same age as a lot of my professors. at our school
we have a very different relationship with our professors as
most. we call them all by their first names, and in some form of
the word they become our friends. they seem so young and full of
life, and it hit me that Leslie was young and full of life too, but
that life was drained out of him too early.
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| | Posted 4/4/2007 8:05 AM - 0 comments
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