two decades of illness

i.

Drunk at 7:30 on a Friday, he’s telling me the story of how he lost his license; there’s a whiskey haze forming, I ain’t listening too closely.

“…crashed into a lamp post, got out the car and I was drinking another beer! Said my nerves are shot, you know, I’ve just had an accident, but I blew a thirteen point oh, so they hauled me off…”

And you fucker, seriously. I’m swirling rye and whiskey and ice around in my tumbler, it’s looking stormy like my goddamn mood; here’s me not even wanting to drink the fucking poison no more, the way you’ve treated it and it’s treated you.

He’s got this way of laughing, it’s a toothless, drink-drowned laugh: “ah! ah! ah!” is the best onomatopoeic translation I can provide, like a real human laugh reversed on a tape deck submerged in boiling water. Anyway:

“…got out of jail round three-thirty a.m., got home at five – still drunk, ah! ah! ah! Told her I lost my license, wrecked the car; the insurance will cover it, don’t even worry about it. Well, doesn’t she just fly off the handle. I told her ‘you ain’t worked for thirty years, you get a job and you can support us then! If you didn’t bitch at me, I wouldn’t have left and crashed the fucking thing!’ You ever see an angry grizzly bear on TV? That’s her when she’s mad…”

Then the conversation turns to my grandmother and again she becomes strong, smart and vibrant in his memory. It is a welcome change from how she is in mine:
sick, disabled, dying.

ii.

Sick from the drink at 1:30 Saturday morning, I’ve got an old liquid molten brick in my gut and she and I are talking about my grandmother some more.

“You know, she was the proudest, strongest woman, and to end up in diapers and a wheelchair? I mean, come on, God!”

And fists are shaken at the sky,
and human candles snuff out, die.

I feel like I miss her most of all because I only know what I missed.
Everyone else got to be there to see it.

iii.

Fuck.

I miss you;

Is it so wrong that I should feel resentful of others that they got to know you better when they all but tell me I would have appreciated your company more?

Is it so wrong that one kindred spirit should mourn the passing of another before that connection could even be made?