The anniversary of my uncle's death happened recently.
As the title says, the anniversary of my uncle's death came up recently. I wouldn't have known if it hadn't been for the posts on Facebook, from members of my family mourning his death. I wouldn't have known the day he died if it hadn't been for a specific post on Facebook that caught my attention.
I remember my uncle pretty well. For as long as I could remember, he had a particular phobia that kept him home. He didn't leave the house, ever. Our family would bring him his cigarettes, and to make money, he would fix the things people brought him. He was well loved within the family. I loved him, too. He was my uncle, after all.
Some years ago, he got sick. To go to the doctor, he had to ride with a blanket over his head and his headphones on. They found out he had cancer. A few months later, his cancer was discovered to be highly aggressive, and he would only have a few more weeks to live. Although the cancer didn't start in his lungs, it was attributed to his cigarette addiction. I cried when I found out he died.
A few weeks later, I was asked to go through his computers and collect all of the family photos he had. While I was working on this, I stumbled across some a folder with pictures and videos of a particular nature involving children. I went back to my grandmother's house and collected all of his hard drives, all of his CDs, everything he had that could store information, and I took it all to the local branch of the FBI. My grandmother and her children, my parent and other aunts and uncles, know what I found, and why I came to collect it. Why I had to do what I did.
What bothers me most is that the post on Facebook, mourning my uncle's death, depicts children he never met and implies that they would have loved him in the same way I had when I was a child. The person that posted this knows what I found. Why the hell would they post that? I can't wrap my mind around it. I can't fathom it. Have they forgotten? I can excuse the extended family, because most of them don't know, but the immediate family, why? I get wanting to mourn the son or brother you knew. As a parent, I haven't mourned his death since the day I found that shit on his computer.
I am angry, and I don't know if I'm making any sense at this point, but I am angry not because my family is trying to mourn someone they've lost, someone that I can't, that I won't mourn, but because someone posted a picture of kids and said "Miss you \[pedo uncle\]", knowing the kind of stuff that was found on his computer. Fuck that.
Posted Mar 6, 2019 01:49 by anonymous
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