(no subject)

[senoritafish]

It hasn’t even been 24 hours yet. I am only hopping on and off because I have to keep the phone free. John’s brother Jay came by yesterday afternoon after work, but before I got home. He asked John to borrow some money; and John gave him some, thinking he was going to get some cigarettes or beer to celebrate the new job he had just gotten that week after a long spell of unemployment. He was pretty happy, and John thought he’d had a couple of beers. He gave Jay $15 and told him we needed it back soon because we needed to buy wipes. Jay said sure, he’d give it back tomorrow; he was coming over to do some yard work for my dad, and would repay John from what my Dad paid him.

I had been playing around on the computer and was just getting up to get ready for bed, around 11:30, when a knock sounded on the front door, and a policeman shone a flashlight in our front window. Dad opened the door and the cop said "Does a John live here, his mother in Long Beach needs him to call, she can’t get through." I immediately got a horrible feeling. I’ve been meaning to buy a Catch-a-Call for a while. John phoned his mom, who told him that the paramedics had just left, unable to do anything for Jay. He had apparently died of a heroin overdose. As far as we knew he hadn’t been using since before Angus was born, about four years. I guess for some reason he decided to use something to celebrate and either got some bad stuff or no longer had the tolerance he once had. We won’t know until the autopsy report.

The coroner hadn’t arrived yet, and we sat in the living room with John’s parents until they did. John and I went for a walk when they finally did; John did not want to see them bring his brother out of the house; his mom lives in a mobile home with an odd floor plan and they could not use a gurney. After the coroner left, we sat and talked for a while, trying to figure out why this happened. You can’t ever figure it out but you have to try. At about 1:30 am, she sent us home, but John’s dad stayed. They are married but separated at this point but that’s another story.

Jay has quite often been my kid’s babysitter and they are pretty close. They’ve already lost two great-grandparents this year, but that was more expected and they didn’t know them all that well. Jay was only 40 and was a rough and tumble playmate as well as a caretaker. I’m at a loss. How do we go about telling a 2 and a 4 year old they are never going to see Uncle Jay again, when they just saw him perfectly fine yesterday afternoon?

John is pretty devastated; he stayed in bed, wracked by sobs. He and Jay survived years of severe abuse by their stepfather, making them closer than most brothers. He told me they were more like war buddies. They spoke almost every day, even when they were mad at each other, which was often.

The older two know something’s wrong. Gareth asked why he was crying, and John isn’t quite up to telling him. Angus told him Men don’t cry, very sternly - where a four year old got that idea, I don’t know. We certainly never told him that.

I don’t know what else to say. I was not close to Jay, but he was, no, make that is, loved by people I love, so it affects me almost as much.