I LOST MY NEPHEW 12 years ago on Christmas Day. He was only 20 years old, and he accidentally overdosed on drugs. My nephew Shane passed away nine months after his mother, my sister, passed away from breast cancer. I think of my nephew every day and I pray and talk to him because I still can’t believe he’s gone. His no longer living just seems so surreal to me that he’ll never grow up or get married or have children.
I always wondered what my nephew Shane would have become and what kind of career he would have pursued. I haven’t told many people this, but after my sister passed away from breast cancer in March 2011 I gave my nephew Shane a little bit of space. But a month later I started to really be concerned about him. There was my nephew on the East Coast in New Jersey, and here I was on the West Coast.
So I began to call him much more frequently, and I even began to reach out to strangers on Facebook who resided in the neighborhood where he was living. I was not in the position at the time to fly back there and to really look into what he was doing. But I had an ongoing really bad feeling that went on for months and months. I even reached out to other family members asking for their help, but for some reason no one took my concern as valid or felt the seriousness of it.
I called my nephew so much that by November of 2011 he called me and told me not to call him anymore and not to call him ever again. His call came in while I was at my job, and I said to him listen let’s not make this final right now. Let’s just take a break. I understand.
But really inside I really didn’t understand because I had a really bad feeling and then a month later he was dead.
I got the news through an old friend of mine from high school who had heard the news and told me when I called her just to say hi. It didn’t make sense, like how could that be? And so I panicked, and I called my brother and told him what I had heard from my friend. And he said to me, why would she say something like that? And I said to my brother I don’t know, but you need to find out whether it really happened. You need to call around.
By that point I was in such a state of shock and my head was spinning that I couldn’t believe what I had just heard. I guess I really didn’t want to believe it, so in my panic I insisted my brother find out if it was true. And then there it was. It was true.
His funeral was on New Year’s Eve. And while I sat in the church during his funeral, I still couldn’t believe that he was gone.
Today I still can’t believe he’s gone. I guess the only one thing that makes me feel any comfort is that he’s in heaven with his grandmother and his mother, and now they’re all together again.
Jerome Cleary is a columnist for The LA Independent and lives in West Hollywood. He can be reached at jeromecleary@aol.com.
