I wake up with the same familiar hangover on a Thursday morning after stumbling home from my monthly writing workshop. More than the craft beer we drank, the words I said throb in my veins: Why would you share that? How are you even qualified to run a workshop, you haven’t even published your own book, you stupid piece of… I roll over and pick up my phone. Where are the games this weekend? I text my sister, asking when I might drive down to see my nephews’ baseball games. I haven’t seen them in months since my sister’s birthday, and don’t like to go more than a month. I’m a shit uncle, too. Great.

The night before, I drafted a poem about my dad’s brother:

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When I think about Uncle Dougie, I remember when he scared the shit out of me. While sitting in my grandparents’ dark living room with the fake fireplace lined with dusty pewter cups, my family and I sat on old couches with stitched blankets and lopsided pillows. We were taught the house was haunted since it was built in 1770, and when a man descended the stairs near the front of a room in a skull and crossbones shirt with a mask on, my sister and I screamed and cried. It was, of course, the one person who wasn’t in the room: Uncle Dougie.

I can’t remember if this was before or after his son, Jason died in a car crash at 17, nor how that grief transformed him, my grandparents, my parents. My sister was seven and I was six, and my memories of Uncle Dougie were mostly that he lived in an RV in what used to be my grandparents’ garden behind their garage.

He came and went through that old house like a ghost, and as we grew up, we saw him less and less, and we celebrated most of our holidays with my mom’s side of the family.

One spring day, I must have been about 11 or 12, I was home alone while my parents watched my sister’s softball game. Sitting at the house computer, a car pulled in front of the house and parked. Two men got out of the car and came to the door, one was Uncle Dougie, the other was a man with slicked back hair.

“Where’s your old man?” Uncle Dougie said.

“At Alyssa’s game,” I said, slightly nervous. We hugged and he introduced me to his friend.

“This is my Godson!” he told the man. The two went into the kitchen, pulled out a bottle of scotch and poured two glasses.

“Look at this watch!” Uncle Dougie said, calling me into the kitchen and shaking his wrist to show what must have been an expensive watch. I feigned marvel, fidgeting a little bit. He looked different than I remembered. His clothes seemed slightly nicer, he seemed happy. It must have been three years since I saw him last. The interaction was short lived, and they were on their way within a half hour, leaving me alone again.

“Don’t be a stranger,” my uncle said before he left, as if I could make it further than the town borders on my own. The interaction was mostly innocent, but I felt uneasy. When I told my parents, they were surprised to hear this, and matched my discomfort. Though we didn’t explicitly talk about what Uncle Dougie had been up to, I gathered he was spending a lot of time in New York City, possibly involved with drugs, alcohol, and shady people. The next time I saw him was in a hospital bed on Long Island when I was sixteen. Besides moving to a long-term care facility, he never made it out.

Between Uncle Dougie and my mom’s brothers, what I learned about uncles is that they were a) trouble and b) needed to be respected because of their time served in the U.S. military. By blood, my sister and I have had three uncles, with several more ‘uncles’ that we’d see at the alternate holidays, like the Super Bowl, random Saturday in January for a Christmas Exchange, Backyard Barbecue. These other uncles were always around, randomly, like the “family you choose”, except we didn’t choose them, and they always felt like jerks to me, the way they’d make fun of each other constantly.

After Uncle Dougie’s funeral, we had drinks and food - and all the uncles were there, blood and bros. He was always a little weird when we were back in high school. Uncle L said, but he was always around.

Was he always around at one point in life? Was he actually weird, or were these guys just assholes?

Thinking about my genetic makeup, I always saw myself in both of my grandfathers - the crossword puzzles, emotional, horoscoping pop-pop on my mom’s side, the writer and reader on my dad’s side. And I’d wondered if I ever became an uncle, who would I be like? The present one who feels like they’re not there? The one who’s not there but feels like he’s haunting everyone? The kind-of-an-asshole?

***

Laying on the hospital couch facing the back cushions, outstretched, the sun started to make its way through the hallway and into the waiting area. My family and I waited for news on the birth of my nephew. After over a day in labor and agonizing pain, they transferred my sister to the operating room to perform a C-section.

“Any news?” Rob texted me.

“Nothing yet.” We were on a break, ‌but he felt part of the family and wanted to be there for me, for us, was what he said when he dropped me off at the hospital. Not long after, my first nephew, was born - with his little mop of hair and chubby cheeks. I never saw anything like it.

Becoming an uncle was easy for me - as a person constantly aware of the brevity of life, the future was here and needed to be prioritized. I spent weekend days with my sister and the family in their house as the curtains were drawn to encourage naps. It always felt so dark, but the giggles, the rolling over, the pure curiosity lit the toy-filled room.

I was settling down myself - at this time, Rob and I were planning to get our apartment. My best friend was readying to have her first baby. This was it - how life becomes what we’re drawing in elementary school - the houses, the dogs, the stick figures, the sun in the corner. I was quickly deemed the funcle. But it didn’t last.

Rob and I split, he wanted a house deep in the suburbs, I wanted to be out and meet new people, live a new life every day. I doubt my nephews remember him, and after years of heartache, I rejected the idea of a traditional life.

When I moved to Jersey City in 2022, I made a thousand new friends while swaying to local bands, starting a writing group, and bouncing between the local dives. I started traveling again. I fell in love again. I was living the life I didn’t know I needed. But with that, the distance between me and the next generation grew. I only saw them if I drove down to the suburbs since they’re all afraid of parallel parking. When I return home people ask if I found someone, if I’m settling down yet.

Settle down? I thought it was some crazy concept. I just woke up with Taco Bell in my bed.

I tell my nephews about my writing when I see them, share my medals I received for the 5ks I ran (but I didn’t win it, Uncle T), show videos from the music festivals that I went to. Getting out of bed and walking to the cafe, I think of Uncle Dougie’s watch. After his son died, he found something to pursue, something to bring him back to life, and we’ll never know what it really was about, even if it was to his detriment, even if that meant we didn’t see him. Did he think about what he would do differently as a parent? Or if he could have another?

I often wonder what my nephews need more, their uncle in the stands at their baseball game, or their uncle pursuing joy so fucking hard every day.

I barely know my high-school-best-friend’s kids, a reality I didn’t expect. But I think about them, I write about them, and I wonder if my uncles thought about me, too, when they were on their journeys.

It’s probably too late for me to become a father now, especially since I don’t want a partner and, well, student loans. But some mornings when I am doing the crossword at a cafe, I imagine I have a son and he’s sitting across from me with his backpack on. I tell him school will be there when we get there. Take this time. Tell me what you’re looking forward to today, what you’re afraid of. Tell me, and then let’s get through this day.

I have never been an athlete. As a kid, my body betrayed me by passing out just over the finish line or in the outfield during a softball game. As a gifted and talented fifth grade student, theater camp was more my speed. Playing a dying Beth in Little Women was better than sports for me. My destiny was to be a theater kid who ran away with the circus.

With a BA in theater, and incredibly good fortune, I started working in wardrobe for Cirque du Soleil - surrounded by some of the best athletes on earth. Two years later, I transferred to the Asia Pacific tour, and found my noticeably bigger self in Tokyo. I was instantly self conscious - but being the biggest girl in the room felt familiar to me.

Starting in middle school, I was always two or more sizes more than the girls around me. Often mistaken for someone much older than me, this had its advantages. But fitting in was not one of them. Trying to keep up with friends who were smaller and more athletic was also a challenge.

On a high school hiking trip in Palo Duro Canyon, I got stuck coming out of a cave. We were laughing so hard, I could barely breathe, much less pull myself out of a hole too small for my “child bearing hips.” I envisioned a park ranger coming to rescue me…or worse, having to go alone back down into the dark cave to get out. Thankfully, I made my way out…my laughter turning to tears. In college, it was the same. From struggling in dance class to being left out of physical trips with friends, I started to really hate my body. And now, thousands of miles away from home surrounded by smaller people and hard bodied circus artists - here I was. A large, curvy red-headed American woman living abroad.

There was a bike culture on tour and I very quickly bought one to get around. After reading an article about biking in Asia, it made me wonder… I was walking 40 minutes to work, riding my bike and taking Aikido classes. I was in the best shape of my life. Nagoya, the city we were in, was about 120 miles from Osaka, the next city on our tour. We had five days on tour break. The thought of taking off on my own bike trip excited me.

Experienced cyclists said it would take two days for them, with an estimated five days for me, camping along the way. I gave into the adrenaline, and without much research or thought, I quickly put flyers around the artistic tent asking to borrow camping gear for this wild adventure.

People started talking and suddenly there was more traffic in the wardrobe trailer and at my table in the dining hall from well meaning artists giving advice and encouragement. Some artists said they wouldn’t dare to do this trip. Before those statements started to completely freak me out, a performer from the show asked if she could join me.

“Shaz - I am not an athlete - I am not going to be able to keep up with you.” “That’s alright,” she said with an Australian lilt, “I’m lazy - we can take our time.”

It seemed like we all took a collective sigh of relief. I found out later that some artists were making literal bets that I wouldn’t make it. And there were times on this trip, I didn’t think I would. But we were resolute and it was happening.

Shaz and I bought maps, none of them in English. We planned our route, estimated our stops and decided that if we got lost, we had a compass and would just keep going west. Japan is an island after all, we were going to hit Osaka eventually.

Fueled by our excitement, we had an easy first day riding out of Nagoya. Day two was the beast. Mount Gozaisho. Riding up the mountain was truly torture. Pedaling up the mountain was nearly impossible at my weight. I had to stand to pedal. And when I couldn’t stand, I had to stop and walk my bike up. And when I just couldn’t walk, I took breaks. It was hot. I was sweating, in pain and we were almost out of water.

I started to panic and then cry, thinking, “I have made a terrible mistake. I am not going to make it. I’m going to disappoint Shaz because we can’t complete this trip. I’m gonna pass out and she’s gonna have to get help.” Shaz saw me crying behind her and said, “We are almost to the top!”

I yelled, “You’ve said that twice already! We should hitchhike with one of these trucks that keeps passing us or turn back and take the train. I can’t do it!”

“We can’t turn back now. Take as many breaks as you need.” And with her hands on my shoulders, Shaz looked at me squarely and said, “We can do this.”

Pushing through the fear and anger, by dusk, we made it. We took a moment to take in the view and what we had just done. I was overwhelmed and tears came with the realization my 250lb body had done this truly athletic thing I could not imagine in my wildest dreams I could do. The daily walking, biking to the laundromat and challenges of Aikido had prepared me in ways I didn’t realize.

The rest of the trip was our reward. Speeding downhill breathing in the fresh Japanese countryside, skinny-dipping in a reservoir, avoiding wild monkeys and communing with wild deer. We overcame being lost, crashing my bike, and trying to explain ourselves to very confused and concerned Japanese folks along the way. Five days later, sunburnt and rain-soaked, we reached Osaka.

Shaz put her arm around my shoulder, looked into my eyes and said, “Can you believe we did that with our bodies?”

I experienced it - so I know it happened. But I could hardly believe it. We survived the heat, the rain, burning through granola bars and protein drinks with the occasional hot meal. Looking back at a photo of us, Shaz looks like she just came home from a resort; I look like I just got home from Survivor.

Now, at 53, my body is different. It’s heavier, in perimenopause and with limited mobility because of my knees. But my body is still taking me on adventures. On a recent trip with friends, we ascended the climb from the beach and I thought about Mount Gozaisho. I thought about all the real and metaphorical mountains I’ve had to climb in my life. My journey has seemed harder and longer. And through many milestones, of course there has been pain. I guess I have always had an athlete inside of me - training and pushing myself beyond what I thought I could endure.

Being in this body is challenging, and it has taken me my whole life to appreciate and love her. But until the day I die, I will be proud to say, I did all of that - with this body.

The first thing I did whenever I walked into my parents’ assisted-living apartment during my recent extended visit over the holidays was check whether there was a glass of water on the table next to my mother’s rocking chair. The sight of an empty coaster made me livid with my father for his failure to place one there for her.

Hydrating is theoretically an easy thing to do, but like everything else with my mother since her Alzheimer’s has progressed, water is hard.

Not that my mother has ever been easy. She’s always argued every point, no matter how small, and I’ve long wondered whether arrogance or insecurity drives her dogged need to be right. Once, while eating at a Panera Bread near my parents’ home in Saint Augustine, Florida, before my older sister drove me to the airport, I joked with my family that if you told my mother, “The sky is blue,” she would immediately counter, “Not if it’s cloudy.” My mother didn’t laugh and refused to hug me goodbye as I left for New York.

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Now that she’s 82 and her Alzheimer’s made my parents move into assisted living near my sister in Jacksonville, drinking water, or rather, getting my mother to drink water, can make all the difference. Drinking water means getting dressed and leaving the apartment to go to Bingo or the daily social hour in the bar area of the assisted living place (with the super-Florida name, Sea Grass), so I can partake of the one glass of wine allotted to visitors. Or, staying in the apartment all day in her housecoat with the blinds drawn and the door to the balcony blocked because of my mother’s increasing fear that her little black cat, Mandy, will get out.

“She sneaks out of the apartment at night,” my mother told me numerous times while sundowning on a dry day, “And then I have to go find her.”

The cat has never even tried to get out of the apartment, but my mother’s disease and dehydration make this her reality.

Drinking water means playing the oversized Connect Four I discovered on Sea Grass’s back lawn and actually getting to feel the sun on my face for 30 minutes, while my mother sits in a chair and I scramble around to pick up the hockey-puck-sized disks at the end of each game. Or, simply saying “Okay” when my mom argues that I can’t be her daughter because “Kelly was here earlier and left already.”

Because now, there’s no point in arguing with her, and because insisting that “No, I’m Kelly” does nothing but make me cry.

(Sidenote: Regardless of her Alzheimer’s, my mother refused to remember to call me Kelly Jean since I started going by my first and middle name in high school. So, I’ve learned to let that go. See what a good job I’m doing?)

Drinking water means successfully coaxing my mother into taking a much-needed shower instead of waving the nurse aide away for whatever excuse she has come up with today. Or, getting slapped for pushing her too hard.

Getting my mother to drink water makes a blessed difference. So why can’t my father make sure she has water? Here’s why: You can’t just tell my mother to drink water. When you do finally go “roust” (as my father says) her out of bed around 10, 11, or even noon, you must wordlessly hand her an eight-ounce glass as she slowly gets up. Then, nod when she inevitably says, “I’ve been awake for hours, but I slept terribly last night. So, I didn’t feel like getting up. I’ve just been lying in here, playing with Mandy.”

When you hand her the water, she will say, “Is this for me? Why?”

“Yes. It’s good to drink water when you first get up.”

She will drink two solid sips; then you can tell her that you’ll put the rest on the table beside her chair. Afterwards, you’ll have this conversation as long as you stay in the apartment.

“Can you dump this glass for me? It’s been sitting out all night.”

“No, it’s new. I just put that there for you.”

“You did? Thank you.”

The good thing is that whenever she looks down and sees the water, she takes a sip. The bad thing is, every fourth or fifth sip, she’ll look down and say, “Can you dump this glass for me? It’s been sitting out all night.”

Other things that make water hard:

The glass can’t be too big.

The glass can’t be too full (the cat might knock it over).

Water with a meal has to have lemon and a straw, even though she rarely uses the straw.

It can’t have too much ice, or else each time she takes a sip, my mother will grimace, say, “My, that’s cold,” and complain about the amount of ice for the entire meal or social hour.

If there is no ice, she will complain that the water is warm.

If you order her water with “a little bit of ice,” it will start out okay, but eventually the ice will melt, and she will complain that there’s no ice.

The last on the list is what often happens when we sit at the Sea Grass social hour, coloring, which is the happiest time I have with my mother, and not just since her Alzheimer’s took hold. Watching my teenage niece navigate her ADHD gave shape to the undiagnosed reason why my mother couldn’t stay present, flitting away in the middle of half-watched movies and heartfelt conversations the second something else crossed her mind. Leaving me to swim against the stream of her consciousness to recapture her attention.

Now, the weird blessing of this disease is that, if you can get her locked in, my mother will focus all the attention she has left on a singular activity to completion. At 48, I’ve spent more hours “playing” with my mother in the past two years than I did in my entire childhood. What we both love most are the cat-centric coloring books drawn by an artist friend of mine in New York. My mother pages through each book, delighted by the adorable cat drawings and astonished by how many pictures she’s already colored. Thank goodness she had the idea to initial and date our completed masterpieces when I gave her the first one last year for Christmas.

Out of our handful of repeated conversations, this is my favorite:

“Kelly, where did you get these again?”

“My friend Ashley makes them.”

“Oh, that’s right. You told me that. And does she sell them?”

“Yes, at local art fairs and online.”

“She is a very talented young woman.”

The level of engagement that coloring provides my mother is perfect, and my allotted glass of wine is life-saving. Amidst my anger and frustration, there is gratitude for the increasingly rare afternoons where water has granted us this time together and guilt for enjoying the focused activity Alzheimer’s has trapped my mother’s brain into.

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There is also hubris that I can fix everything somehow by getting water “right.” Impossible because Alzheimer’s or no, my mother is still my mother, even when she doesn’t remember that I’m her daughter.

One day, at social hour, I thought I’d cracked the drink challenge. After setting my mother up with coloring books and a big box of Crayola Twistables colored pencils (which I highly recommend because the twist-up feature means you don’t have to sharpen them), I ordered our drinks at the bar. White wine for me, and because my mother was feeling saucy that day, Ginger Ale for her with no ice. Then, I ordered a second glass of just ice so she could control the ice-to-liquid ratio herself.

“Did you get a spoon? For the ice?” my mother asked, extinguishing my excitement.

“Oh, get over yourself already,” I snapped, breaking. “Just use your freaking fingers.”

The awesome thing about Alzheimer’s is that you and your mother can yell at each other in the middle of a bar in the middle of senior living—to the point where the other residents who have nicknamed you “the coloring crew” and the bartender who winks as she fills your one glass of wine to the tippy top look concerned—and then, literally two minutes later, can be coloring happily as if nothing had ever happened. My mother doesn’t remember the yelling, and next time I’ll remember the spoon.

No wonder my father, who is also 82 and has severe mobility issues after a terrible fall a few years ago, can’t keep up with the water. He sacrificed so much for my mother throughout their marriage, including his own independence by moving into assisted living with her. My mother has exhausted him, but he won’t put her in memory care because, after 55 years of marriage, he doesn’t know how to live without her.

“Why even do any of these things if I can’t remember them?” my mother had asked on Christmas when, after being surprised that today was, in fact, Christmas, she was upset to learn we’d gone to my sister’s for Christmas Eve dinner, and she had no memory of the night before.

So, why bother? With water? With any of it?

Shortly before I left for New York, I was getting my mother a glass of water from the complimentary station, or what I like to call “hotel water,” in Sea Grass’s lobby. She’ll drink it on the days when lemon slices float inside.

“Have you seen the game?” she whispered to me while leaning over her walker to take the styrofoam cup (Florida!) of water out of my hands.

“What game?”

“In the backyard. There’s this game. You have to come see it. Your father taught me how to play.”

She meant the oversized Connect Four that I’d shown her, but I knew better than to argue. She didn’t remember that it was me who played with her until my back ached from picking all the pieces up off the ground over and over. Still, something was in there. Something good had stuck. Drinking water is important. Even when it’s hard.

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