I had a tie-dye t-shirt when I was young,
but I don’t think it was what my uncle was talking about.
He was in hospice, with not many visitors
because of a disease with a growing population
but few letters in its name.

My parents thought he didn’t have long
and what did I know?
I kept my mouth shut
and kept my distance
because my uncle
had been increasingly sick
for a while.

He said people had stopped visiting him.
“Friends have dropped from my circle.
The smell of dying keeps them away.”

I heard this the day I was wearing a pale blue tie-dye design
that had been made in class,
so I shrugged.
He must have meant something else again.

We were some of the last visitors he had,
he said.
He wasn’t an uncle by blood,
but we loved him just the same,
for a while.