I'm having a hard time, people. Two or three days ago I deactivated my facebook account. I was going to do the same with Twitter and even this blog. The intention was to shut down for a while because the all the babbling in the stream made me crazy. I had nothing to offer the voices but cutting bitterness. I wanted to destroy happy little emoticons with acid edged words. I wanted to say everything you don't dare say when you are angry. I wanted to speak with the Devil's own tongue. Instead I cut the breakers before any real damage was done.

You see, my uncle died early Friday morning. It was not a surprise. We knew it was coming. He knew it was coming. He bought himself a slow death by the bottle. About six months ago he was told he would have less than a year if he didn't stop. Well, he didn't stop. I'm not sure he knew how.

This man; this wretched, tortured man had once been my hero. It was a thing I could have used against him in his later years if I had ever conjured enough anger: "You were my hero! Now, look at you!" But by then I had long since put the notion of heroes aside and he certainly didn't rank among them in his abusive state. I still loved him but I also hated him for not being strong enough to break free of his poison.

He was a Green Beret. I was born during the first of his two tours in Vietnam. I was the flowergirl at his wedding. He had a rough way of tickling you till you were helpless and laughing and crying and he still would-not-stop.

There are memories of him I have that are like silent flip book movies: my mother and father fighting - both struggling with a shotgun between them. It was all chaos and screaming. My father, a few years divorced from my mom, had come to steal my brother and I. I didn't understand anything was wrong until my mother ran out of the house screaming and crying and pointing a shotgun at my dad who was about to back out of the driveway with us in the station wagon. It was odd. Just like in the movies: two people fighting over a rifle, it's muzzle wavered between them first pointing up then down and back again. I'm not sure where he came from but my uncle walked, *walked* up to them and within a blink he had the gun and had them separated. He was calm and had calmed them. It was over.

He had been my hero before that for more insignificant things. Even before that day I understood how noble he was. It was knowing how great he was that made his downward spiral so hard to bear. Little by little, bit by bit this living icon of my childhood faded away to something sad and infuriating.

In his last days I spoke to him with an upbeat casualness about how things would be when he got of the hospital. My disdain for the alcoholic was gone. It did not matter any more that he had fallen so far. It did not matter any more that he had allowed time and the bottle to betray the legend I once held in my mind. It did not matter that he had slowly killed himself. I just talked to him and held his hand, wrinkled skin soft and yielding entirely unlike the calloused hand that once wiped away my tears.

Had I known he would pass away that night I would have told him then.

I'll never be as strong or noble as you. I'll never be able to do the things you did. But if I ever did anything to make you proud, it was because you were my hero.