He was happy as far as I could tell, but then again I was only 5. I remember my tio, my uncle, as the one who would take me to McDonalds and let me pretend that I was driving his Porsche. He called me Moola, because he always said I was worth more than all the money in the world.
Over the years I saw less and less of my tio. I never asked why; it was an understood yet unspoken reality.
Tio lived with his parents, my abuelos, on Bruen Street in Newark. He would enter and exit through the back basement door.
His room was dark, but there was lighting all over. There was a bed in the corner and a small TV directly in front of it. There was a black sofa; on the rare times I went in the basement that’s where I would sit. His room gave me the creeps: condoms all over, rubber bands and what I thought were my abuelita’s sewing needles.
I was 15 years old while visiting my abuelos when I saw Tio for the first time in years. I was with my two cousins and my dad. We went to pick up some rice pudding—Abuelita makes the best rice pudding—and we saw Tio. I recognized him. He was a bit thinner and older than I remember, but he was still undeniably my tio.
It was shocking that he didn’t know me or my name. I was his niece, his Moola.
He offered to play cards with my cousins and me. Scared and hesitant, we went to the living room. His blank stare stopped me cold, made me anxious, made me wish I’d never seen this.
Tio pulled up his sleeves to deal. His arms were scarred with tiny holes, a series of circular marks embedded like permanent tattoos. I closed my eyes in disbelief, hoping to open them and realize that it had been my imagination. But that wasn’t the case. I opened my eyes, and the signs of drug abuse were right there for me to see. My tio was an addict.
On July 31, 2006, my abuelos brought Tio to my house at 7 a.m. Through tears, Tio told my parents that it was his own fault that he was mentally and physically exhausted, but at 44 years old, life wasn’t even worth living. His body was swollen to three times its normal size. He could not wear shoes because his feet were enormous. He could not sleep lying down because then he couldn’t breathe. He slept in a chair or in his van for two whole months. He could not eat because he could not swallow.
That day, Tio was hospitalized in intensive care and stayed there for five weeks. He had heart surgery to replace his aortic valve. He was on dialysis three times a day for kidney failure. His liver was not functioning. His veins collapsed. The doctors said he had a 20 percent chance of survival.
On August 12, I went to see my tio. I had to wear a paper hospital gown, wash my hands and wear rubber gloves. I had to wear a mask over my mouth and nose. He could see only two people at a time for five-minute periods.
My dad, his older brother, came in with me. I wasn’t prepared for the way he looked. Tubes were everywhere—in his mouth, throat, nose, neck, side, leg and arms. Machines were everywhere, too: A respirator was breathing for him, and dialysis was cleaning his kidneys. Antibiotic injections kept him alive.
I couldn’t talk to him and say all that I wanted to say because I knew he couldn’t talk back. All I could do was watch.
I watched the green lines on his heart machine indicate that his heartbeats were stable; I listened for the beep every 30 seconds. I watched him try to rip the mask off his face. I watched him realize that he had absolutely no strength in his body. I watched him intensely for five minutes, but those five minutes felt like two seconds.
As I left the room my dad stopped me. I turned, my tio’s hand touched mine, and his lips moved. I swear he called me Moola.
It was a long car ride home from the hospital. My dad told me how my uncle had been a heroin addict for about a year, and that Tio had done everything from pot and cocaine to crystal meth and morphine. He assured me that whatever happened was out of anyone’s control; we had to let fate do its job.
Days later, I went to visit again. I walked in as he yelled at the nurses who tried to comfort him. He thought everyone was out to get him. He had no money to his name, but he blamed doctors and nurses for stealing from him. He even thought they were poisoning his food. (The staff soon realized that such ridiculous thoughts were actually a reaction to one of his medicines.)
Still, he made friends at the hospital. To my surprise, he was someone’s favorite patient. The nurses said he was “crazy but funny.” I told them to tell me something I didn’t know. One nurse even said that when she was too stressed she could count on him to make her laugh. They also said he had a family who cared for him through everything, and that’s what kept him alive.
Elizabeth Rodriguez, a Rutgers-Newark student, first wrote on this subject in Rachel Hadas' class, "Literature and Medicine." Posted January 2008.
