I found out years later that he had used his entire vacation (low-level employees only get a week) to just see if he could make me forget how horrible my life was and get me to smile, just for awhile.

The horrible thing...

I didn't get to say goodbye.

I was in the area from just before Christmas to mid-February.

I didn't go see him. Not once. My lovely lovely Aussie girlfriend didn't ever get to meet this paragon of my family. The proof that the entirety of my genepool wasn't just waiting for chlorination.

Oh, I make excuses...

He wasn't well, and was in hospital nearly the whole time. -- True, but I could have visited in the hospital.

My aunt (his wife) was watching all the 10 grandkids by herself and I didn't want to get in the way. -- Also true, but I also didn't want to chance meeting the grandkids' aunt who stole the money the kids from my brother's school collected for my mother when Michael died because I'd simply throttle her (10 grandkids, the eldest of which is 11, my aunt now has sole custody of now that my uncle is gone... their mothers each have 5 kids and are both in prison for drug convictions).

The truth of it was... I didn't want to think he wouldn't always be there.

And now it's too late.

Too late and I'm horrible.

The only one of my mother's brothers worth anything to me... and I just... forsook him along with them.

And there's no way I'd be welcome at the funeral, being who and what I am.

When I was 14 and told the family that I was a girl, he was the only one present who both took me seriously and accepted me ("Well, if you're a girl, I can't very well call you *******, then. What do you call yourself?").

Even as recently as last month... my mother pointed out the similarities between me and my uncle as far as temperament and personality.

This world is an emptier place already, and it's only been 10 hours since his death. It's only been 6 hours since I found out, and I feel as though there's a piece of me that won't recover.

Retrain of the Jet-Eye. Our own little code to mean that everyone sees things wrong sometimes, and you just have to laugh at yourselves and go on. The first time he saw the title, that's what he saw it as, and we joked about it even up to the last time I talked to him on the phone in August for our birthday.

He taught me the joy in being a geek among the mundanes. His geekery was motors and car innards, and his movie collection (Besides his Disc Player, he had Betamax, VHS, Laserdisc, DVD, DIVX, PSP, DVD-HD... whatever was new and movie oriented, he got... he was saving up for a Blu-ray...).

I don't know if his daughters will even really miss more than the shell of the man, their built in fall-back plan. But I will miss my uncle.

With him dies the last vestiges of any joy I ever gained from being mislabeled as a boy.