my grandpa killed my uncle
but not in the way that you’re thinking. let me give you some background on the characters…
my grandmother was a widow with 3 kids when she married my grandfather. they later had kid #4 which is my dad. grandpa raised my dad’s half-siblings as his own, so the “half” part was never really said out loud.
among these siblings was my aunt, who passed away shortly after a metastatic lung cancer diagnosis in 2015. she was in her 60s. she and her husband were chainsmokers inside of their house for decades.
this story is about her husband, aka my uncle. a few years after my aunt died, my uncle falls in the shower and slips a disc in his back. it’s bad enough that he goes for a surgery consult where they take an MRI. plans quickly change though, because the MRI shows a nodule on his lung. he had no symptoms or any reason to suspect it, but this was stage 2B lung cancer. now we’re kind of glad he slipped in the shower, right? so the spine surgery gets postponed and he spends the better part of a year in cancer treatment.
after some time, he goes into remission. very exciting! this also means he can finally get his spine surgery, and that goes forward without any complications. he recovers well from surgery and reaches 1 year cancer-free. he’s 70 now and getting life back on track for the first time since his wife died.
he has an appointment across town for his 1-year PET scan, just to confirm there’s no relapsing cancer. he gets the all clear! he gets to driving back home with this good news. at a stoplight, someone rear-ends him which sets off the airbags and wrecks his car. he’s taken by ambulance to the hospital where they determine he’s fine, just a broken leg from the airbag. he gets fixed up and sent home to rest.
would you believe that the person who rear-ended him is my grandfather? it wasn’t intentional, and it was pure coincidence that they were at the same place at the same time. my grandfather is nearly 90 at this point and probably shouldn’t be driving anyway. we find out about this later in the day and just kind of think, what are the odds?
my uncle insists he is fine to stay at home alone that night, he has crutches and his leg is in a cast. his back hurts but it’s nothing he can’t handle. this changes though, when he calls my aunt (his SIL) in the middle of the night. he woke up and needed to use the bathroom, but realized he couldn’t move his legs.
an ambulance comes and takes him to the ER, where he’s starting to lose motor function in his arms now too. they get him in an MRI and find that the car accident dislodged the disc he had repaired just a few months prior. it was obstructing his spinal cord more and more as the inflammation increased.
we were devastated the next morning, when we learned that he didn’t make it through emergency surgery. too much damage was already done, and surgeons couldn’t operate fast enough to save him. the shower injury that save him from cancer was now the same injury that killed him. and the craziest part? it was my 90-year-old grandfather who dealt the final blow.
grandpa was never the same after that. he lived to 93 before pneumonia took him from us earlier this year. my mom never forgave him- my uncle was one of her best friends. he never forgave himself. i know my aunt and uncle would have forgiven him despite everything.
this story has been on my mind ever since grandpa’s funeral this past march. i will never quite understand how things played out this way. i’m not the type of person who believes in supernatural forces, an afterlife, or a magical man in the sky. but i do believe there was something at play here, something i can’t explain.