jinian | my cousin L, 1977-2013

I heard last night that he was in acute pancreatic shock, on a respirator and dialysis, and I thought it wouldn't be long. It wasn't.

We were just the same age, second cousins born ten days apart, which made a bond although we never saw each other much. I remember him fondly for his bleached hair and decoratively shaved eyebrow when we were twelve. He appeared to remember me fondly as well: the mother of his daughter looks a lot like me. He was pretty mad when we were younger and I won the bowling-alley costume contest, though; it was a place near him, but I refused to surrender my t-shirt. (He was a vampire; I was a now-embarrassingly-racist gypsy fortune teller. His grandma, my mom's aunt, set me up -- she wasn't about to lose to anyone on eyeshadow and jewelry -- so some jealousy was in the mix too.) I've never met his daughter, who doesn't talk and has some interesting chromosomal abnormalities. Life wasn't easy for L, between troubled relationships and money worries, but his family loved him and I expect he would prefer to still be alive and healthy like he was just about a week ago.