This will be long and get cheesy but I like cheese so deal with it and read it all.
I used to eat amazing meals of my grandmother's, on our 250 acre family farm. It was heaven on earth. Literally every one of their four children and their children attended. That farm was sacred ground as far as we were concerned. We all worked every day for the cause. Sunday was a bare minimal day.
I grew up in the woods on that farm hunting and learning to be a man. Our family was strong, though we fought at times it always washed away.
Christmas time would come and there was no question where the festivities would be held.
This time of year I think about my uncle Mark, a lot. I know everyone in my family who remembers him does.
Mark was a city kid as a child and later moved to the country and met my aunt. My aunt is, was, and always will be one of the most generous and beautiful people I have ever met. Mark was crazy about her and rightfully so.
Mark was on our farm by the age of 17 or so. He was quiet and had transitioned into a cowboy like it was his natural calling. I still see him sitting on his horse "Dusty" in his beat up stetson hat and denim jacket. For some reason when I think of him I think of winter.
He was the physically strongest man on the farm and every young male on the farm looked up to him as a role model. Seeing his orange rusted chevy coming down the drive meant we were about to work and learn something new.
Mark had struggled with depression since he was a young boy, but no one knew at the time.
He had scars across both wrists. He had said that when he was a boy, he had fallen into a glass coffee table that cut his wrists. The two things about his personality that stood out in my memory were his quiet nature and his work ethic, which both seemed as constant as the ground we stood on.
My father and my other uncle absolutely stuck to Mark like brothers, while us younger boys would dive at the chance for a ride along. The three were inseparable.
That farm took every ounce of sweat and blood the men had. My Grandfather oversaw and micromanaged, never seeming to be satisfied. Mark entered that farm as an outsider, but became a staple that literally held it together in an inseperable bloodbound bond.
None of this was clear until the day he left us.
At eleven O'clock one night while sleeping at my grandmothers I woke up to the sound of all the adults in the house crying out and praying at the old farm table, the same table we prayed at every Sunday.
Mark had taken a garden hose and put in in the exhaust pipe of his vehicle, placed the other end into his window, and gone to sleep for the last time.
This is the beginning of the story, not the end...
