When I was a child, around seven years old, my beloved uncle was hospitalized for cancer. I do not know what kind of cancer, but my best guess is lung cancer.
He always smoked, I don't blame him, lots of people did at the time, and the conditions he lived or chose to live in weren't the best.
He was always a resilient person, he plucked nettles from his garden with his bare hands so me and my siblings wouldn't get stung when we were playing outside, we often joked with our mother that he had 'hands of iron'. He made us french fries in his old frying pan. They weren't like the ones from the restaurants, but it was the thought that counted. They were great, by the way. He made them on a sort of gas cylinder stove. He also had a missing thumb, a stump had already grown over it and he liked to show it off to us, as a warning to be careful when we grew up and had to cut firewood. Of course, we were from the city and that didn't really matter to us, but we enjoyed his teachings regardless.
He had a giant CRT TV, which we watched childrens cartoons on. I remember slightly complaining to my mother that it didn't have 'the good channels like we did back at home'. I wonder if that stung him, that I didn't appreciate what he had enough. I don't know if I'm overthinking this, I hope I don't.
When we came to visit, he always had this bowl, bowl of change with a little top with an elevated 'handle' thing in the middle of the cover. I don't know the words, and I won't bother trying to look them up. It was greatly detailed, made of plastic or of 'artificial matter' as they called it. It was an antiquated term, back then during the Soviet occupation. I corrected them sometimes, but I knew it wouldn't matter. He always gave us some coins when we visited.
Once he was hospitalized, we were sad of course. But we were children, we didn't understand the ramifications.
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