There is a song by the Black Crows that is a haunting story of a woman who struggles with addiction and isolation. She just can’t seem kick it and as totems keeps on her two things that symbolized a past she can’t ever get back and an unknown future.
Every time I hear She Talks to Angels I can’t help but think of my uncle Greg. It’s probably because he use to play it on his guitar, although not particularly well. I asked him once about playing guitar he said that, “I just had to feel it.” I was more talking finger positions and he was talking about the rapture of music.
I guess I think of this song because he was also captive to addiction. He had used heavy drugs early in his life and toward the end it was alcohol that possessed and killed him. He died a couple years ago now, but I was just listening to this song and I felt the need to remember him.
How someone dies is not necessarily an indication of the entirety of how they lived. Greg was complicated. My mother told me that when he was a teenager he had been in a practical joke turned accident involving a PCP laced peanut butter sandwich. He wasn’t right in the head for a week and had to learn to be himself again.
I remember Uncle Greg for being the life of the party. He loved people deeply. When I lived in San Ysidro he used to pick me up from middle school because I was always getting in fights walking home and he helped shield me from that. When I was under 10 I once left my wallet on the counter and he put 2 dollars in it telling me that I should never leave my wallet out because maybe next time money gets stolen from it. This was good encouragement but sometimes his street wisdom didn’t make any sense and he was definitely prone to giving some deeply bad advice. I have no doubt that he meant well though.
The last twenty years the more the alcohol took hold the less of him it seemed that there was. He was a shell of himself. He was always reaching for the past. He would cry when more than a few of us got together longing for those same days gone by wondering why it couldn’t be that way again. He didn’t realize that we could only move forward in time not to mention that the bottle in hand acted as a barrier between himself and life giving relationships.
Toward the end he was estranged from almost everyone. He would yell at people and expect them to take care of him by giving him money. He called people vile things and tried to manipulate people into doing what he wanted. When that didn’t work he’d leave voicemails that no one person should ever say to another. In the end he died alone, surrounded by the bottles that killed him, in a cheap hotel in San Ysidro not far where he had put two dollars into my wallet.
No memorial service held for him. He had burned too many bridges. Too much pain engulfs his memory.
In the song the two items the woman carried were a lock of hair, presumably from a child she was estranged from, and a cross pointing to a hopeful future where God would welcome her into his arms. The cross is a symbol of suffering and death. Greg knew suffering and I can’t imagine how many tiny deaths he experienced along the way to his actual one. When he died I have to believe that he was met by a God who had also experienced suffering and death and welcomed him into a relationship where he no longer sees through a mirror dimly. Rest in peace uncle Greg. I hope you find in death what you couldn’t find in this life.
