We laid my Uncle Finn to rest today.

Anytime someone looses someone the natural response is to say “I’m sorry for your loss.” But in this case his death was not our loss. We are not sad because we lost him. Our sadness comes from the fact that we never really had him.  Our loss was his life. The tragedy isn’t how he died but how he lived.

Unfortunately, he chose to live a life that was governed by alcohol. Or maybe he didn’t choose it, maybe it chose him. I’m not really sure. Who, ever really knows, what causes something to grab a hold of someone and never let go or for someone to be unable to let go of that specific thing. But either way, the majority of his life was spent separated from our family.

He was recently given a second chance about a year ago where his sisters, my mom and my aunt, rallied around him and helped pull him through a near death experience and all but hog tied him into rehabilitation. The first time I went to see him with my mom, we sat and talked and laughed and cut up. He was hilarious. It was a side of him that I had never seen. Witty and dry, physically and figuratively all the while he was flirting with his nurses. He picked at my mom like brothers do. It was a wonderful visit and I left there thinking “what a shame!” Sure, he missed out on us, his family…his son and grandbaby, his sisters and nieces and nephews. He missed out on our wonderful family. But  that day when I left the hospital I couldn’t help but think about how much we had missed out on him. He was sweet and funny and surprisingly tender hearted.

Had it not been for that short time of sobriety I probably would have never known that side of him. He would have always been my ‘estranged uncle’ that I had a handful of vague memories peppered through my childhood. But I had a chance to see him and know him and talk to him as the person that he was instead of the addiction that put him in that ‘estranged’ category. He was a person and was defined by his heart, not by alcoholism.

If at any point in his life, his addiction or the Author of Lies ever made him believe that his family didn’t love him because of the way he lived his life, those thoughts and feelings were shattered in his final days. Because despite how he lived his life and despite the choices he made, his family loved him to the best of their ability. We were not called to accept, understand, or like his lifestyle and it most definitely was not our place to judge him. Our responsibility to him was to simply love him from ever how far that may have been at times.  His family loved him good and hard and when he passed from this terrestrial sod into his eternity, he was surrounded by a tremendous amount of love; a love that was genuine and unconditional.

At the end of his life love won because at the end of the day love will win.

….and the greatest of these is love.