What the fuck?

A week ago today, my cousin Adam passed away. Sunday night I got a text from my mom saying that his brother and dad had admitted him to the hospital with some mysterious illness. Monday morning, they diagnosed him with decreased liver and kidney function, but made no comment on his chances of recovery. Monday night, they said he was in the last stages of cirrhosis and there was no hope. Tuesday morning, he was taken off life support, and by 3:15 pm, he was dead.

A complex and dramatic web of family animosity is still brewing and it won't do to describe it here. Suffice it to say that the past week has been strange and exhausting. I haven't had the moment that most normal people probably do, the one where you are supposed to realize that someone is REALLY GONE, but the pervasive thought that keeps arising in my head is simply "What the fuck." Adam and I were close when we were younger, and he continued to be the cousin I connected the most with. Even though he was 13 years older than me, we could still always find things to talk about at family gatherings that no one else seemed interested in -- Family Guy, Danzig, stupid shit we did when we were younger, things we were mad at people about. Family Christmas parties were always boring, but if Adam was there, we could slip away from the geezers and go outside to smoke and talk shit. Why not? We were the funny ones in the family, the ones with the quirky sense of humor. I almost didn't go to last year's Christmas party when I heard that Adam wasn't going to be there; what's the point? I made Jay go to the previous Christmas party just so he could meet Adam -- "You'll love him. Once when I was little he held me upside down until I threw up spaghetti all over the linoleum." What the fuck? There's a comic book store here in Boone called Plan 9 comics. In preparation for last Christmas, I was planning on going in there to see if I could find something for Adam. When I learned he wasn't coming into town, I didn't. But every time I would pass by the store afterwards, I would think, "I should still go in there. I bet I can find something for Adam," but I never had time. Last night I passed by Plan 9 on the way to the grocery store and thought, "I bet I can find something for Adam in there," followed closely by "What the fuck?" After Adam died, his mom, my aunt Linda, adopted his boa constrictor. Its name is Belial, but Linda is renaming her Betty "because Belial means Satan." I wanted to keep her, but for some reason I was vetoed, even though I'm the only one who could feed her a mouse this weekend. I wouldn't have changed her name. What the fuck?