27/365: Chris

He's the neighbour I mentioned in this post.

When my parents bought their house, he was the friendly neighbour next door. He and his wife Gwen did a lot of backyard gardening - huge pots of basil, raised beds of onions, carrots, potatoes, beans and peas, trees full of plums and apples and five gallon buckets with tomatoes. He kept bees to pollinate it all. They didn't have enough money to buy much food so they grew and canned it all. I'm convinced that his dog is absolutely insane, but they were nice enough people.

Then, suddenly tragedy struck. Gwen died suddenly as a result of a brain aneurism and things started to go downhill. The yard started to look unkempt and he dropped a lot of their routines. He began to lose an unhealthy amount of weight.

A couple months after that, his AA partner also died, and almost instantly he was back on the bottle, as well as other more ilicit substances.

Last month he had a stroke and he's too paralyzed to leave the hospital. The doctors say he'll be able to leave in about six months, but noone who has been to see him actually believes that.