Melvin G, RIP

A sad call from my mom this morning. Melvin, her boyfriend through much of the 90s, is dead.

Melvin popped into mom's life sometime in the early 90s, when mom, still getting over divorce from Dad, despairing of meeting an upstanding upper middle-class guy who wasn't a major jerk in some way, hauled in home from a shag club (those of you in Great Britain, it's not what you think). Tan, bearded, he had a bit of Kenny Rogers going on, and he claimed, at least, to have kicked substances. He claimed, as well, to have been in Vietnam, though subsequent discussions would call this into question. He claimed, in fact, to have been trapped below deck on a ship or something which gave him some sort of disability. In fact, it turned out he had been involved in a bad wreck sometime in the 60s, had a head injury, and had never quite recovered.

Melvin's was a sad tail. It's not that he was poor or disadvantaged from the start, he came from a pretty well off family, he just frittered himself away until he flipped the car and busted his head. His first wife died a long, slow painful death. He was basically illiterate, not too skilled, watched a lot of TV, ate a lot of ice cream. He was polite without being terribly charming.

He died more or less of malnutrition. He had a stroke, perhaps because the woman who inherited him from my mom (and would let him drink) decided at some point in time that he should be pushed down the stairs. Discharged, the VA put him in a chain nursing home, where they basically didn't feed him or fed him crap. When he went back to the hospital, the doctors were shocked at how he had deteriorated. The doctors let his girlfriend take him out of the hospital during the day, which now appears to have been a bad decision, as it did him precious little good.

It's all very sad because, although he's survived by a number of children, one of them a one-time racist psychopath who passed for a normal guy in Eastern North Carolina, it was kind of a wasted life. He never accomplished much. He never conquered his demons. He never really learned to read.

May he rest in peace.