Heartbreak

My uncle had been sick for some time. We knew that he didn't have long. I'd mentally prepared myself as much as a seventeen-year-old kid could. He was far away...and in a sad sort of way that helped. It wasn't as immediate. It wasn't so near.

Still I couldn't help but think about him. The times in my life when he'd been right there for me.

When he'd been Dracula for Halloween and taken my sisters and I trick or treating. He let us hide under his cape as we walked the spooky streets in search for candy.

At the last family reunion, while the rest of the family ,grown-ups and kids alike, had been engaged in WWIII with water balloons, he had been cooking dinner and I'd been washing lettuce. We chatted about life while various cousins and siblings ran through the kitchen dodging balloons.

I remembered a phone call he'd made at a pivotal moment in my life, when I was caught between two choices, one of which would have drastically altered my life in an irreparable way. He called to say that things were going to be okay, that I would be fine. How had he known?

But most of the time, I really didn't think about the fact that soon he would die. It was easier.

So when my mom walked into my bedroom one evening in November, I was focused on making a new mix tape and didn't see her standing there for the longest time. When I looked into her tear-filled eyes, it didn't register.

"He's gone", she whispered and then walked out of the room to tell the others.

And I sat there on the floor while my heart fell out of my chest and shattered into a billion pieces on the floor in front of me.

There were no tears. How could I feel anything with my heart completely absent from my body.

I sat very simply. Not understanding...not believing.

How could he be gone?

That was one of the first times that my heart was really broken. Broken so that nothing but time, and faith, and family could partially heal it.

In quiet and reflective moments, I use my mind to trace along the fault lines in my heart. I can feel the rough edges from life's broken moments. They are still there...proving that you can be broken and whole at the same time.

But I have a perfect faith that those crack will be healed fully in another time...in another place...when I'm reunited with my uncle and others who've left their marks on my heart. What a reunion that will be.

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