Cyril was grieving. In fact, he was in the midst of discovering one of the most disturbing topological features of grief: Everything about the deceased that brought you pleasure and delight suddenly becomes a garden of sorrow. Their absence is like a bruise that covers the entire length and breadth of your soul.
He still had a warm and wonderful mother and a perfectly adequate father, but neither could possibly fill the hole left by Uncle Steve. It was Uncle Steve’s copious collection of comic books that taught Cyril to read. It was Uncle Steve’s endless playful cajoling that coaxed Cyril’s fingers to squeeze their first chords out of the neck of a guitar. It was Uncle Steve’s playful command of the concepts set forth in the well-worn philosophy books that lined his shelves that sparked a thousand different conversations that kept sleep at bay and threatened to pull back the covers on the indistinct mass that constitutes reality. Now that smile would slowly widen in a wooden box under the ground while the gateway to boundless love became a stiff white grate with no fire left to guard.
“I will never leave you, possum tooth,” Uncle Steve had told him time and again, using a childhood nickname whose origin was now lost to time. “We will mark all of the holidays together and you will grow as I retract back into my own misspent youth.”
“Then what?” Cyril had asked.
“Than you can visit with me whenever you please.”
Cyril couldn’t bring himself to go to the funeral. The waxy mannequin in the wooden box was not his beloved Uncle Steve. While others tried to remember him or rewrite the parts of his story that they didn’t care for, Cyril ran his fingers over the spines of the books perched on his Uncle’s shelves. There was one that did not bear a title. Cyril extracted it and found a bound, handwritten memoir called Misspent Youth. It took Cyril four years to edit and revise it, but now he and thousands of others can spend time with Uncle Steve whenever they please.
Literature in Small Doses 