my dead uncle

Last night I learned two things:

My uncle died last week
I had an uncle

My family: we’re not close.

I always kind of knew my mother had siblings, but it wasn’t something I gave much thought – honestly, I’ve devoted more time to selecting a brand of toilet paper than I have to thinking about the relatives I have floating around out there in the ether. I’ve joked that I can’t have sex anywhere in south east Asia because there’s a high chance I’d be fucking a cousin, but that’s about as far as my thoughts went. Family is an alien concept to me.

I’m not quite sure how to feel about the passing of this uncle I didn’t know existed. I feel as though I should be a lot sadder than I am, and I feel guilty because I just don’t feel it. I do feel bad that my mom lost a brother, but beyond that .. there’s not much. Does that make me a bad person? I don’t think I’m a bad person. Are you required to mourn people you’re related to, even if you learned about their life and death in the same sentence? That seems like a lot of work. Instead, I will drink a toast to my late Uncle Steve and wish we had met while he was alive. And maybe I’ll ask my mom about her other siblings, so I’m a little more prepared for these things. It would be kind of fun/scary to think about how different my life would have been if I had a big family; to think about what I’d be like if I grew up with a support system and cousins all over the place. Huh. Now I’m all thinky, and not just about whether playing the bereavement card (which, to be fair, only came up at all because I’m editing that section of our employee manual) to get a day off would negatively effect my karma enough to make me Lawful Evil instead of my usual happy standard of Chaotic Neutral.