Steve Bunting

Mitch came back and sat down, and he's crying, and I just looked at him.

I was mad at him, but I wasn't going to rat on him.

right about that time dude i'm sitting over and i look over and my stepdad starts flopping like a fish on the floor and me and mitch are like what's going on like we thought he was messing with us or making fun of us or something and we realized that he was having a seizure so he screamed for my mom she was in the back room it's a single wide trailer right it's not a lot of room i ran back and got hurt and ended up calling 911 and he ends up going to the hospital when he found out he had brain cancer

So over the course of that next, probably it was about a year and a half, we watched this guy just slowly die from brain cancer.

And he ended up dying, you know, the end of my eighth grade year, ninth grade year.

You watched that whole process?

Yeah, I watched the whole process.

Yeah, from the seizure to him being pretty much normal after surgery to not being able to walk and just watching him go into hospice.

And he died right there in that trailer.

I think, you know, he was abandoned by his family and raised in a boy's home.

And I think he struggled.

He didn't have that either.

and uh i think he would try to love on us his best way i think him like providing what he could was his love but there is no love there man there's no love there i was relieved when he passed i hate you know i hate to say it but it's the truth i was relieved i was tired of that chaos i was tired of the beatings and um yeah i was i was relieved would you and your brother talk about this stuff oh yeah stuff what would you talk about yeah we just talk about like we i mean obviously we joked around about it humor was our thing

Like Mitch was hilarious and we would just talk crap about everything.

Right.

We just talk smack and we just we made light of everything, even no matter how dark it was.

We developed a dark sense of humor really early.

We found our ability to laugh about things and joke about it.

And it just became just kind of jokes.

But we definitely we definitely talked about it.