My uncle died on the night of September 8th.
I didn’t know him as well as I would have liked. He was a grab-a-meal-once-each-visit-to-my-mom type of connection. (Who herself is a once-a-year and monthly-ish calls kind of connection.) So it hit me… then my nervous system settled from that blood pressure spike and total dysregulation, and settled into the longer work of grief.
There IS grief—mostly about those left behind. My mortality has been riding shotgun since cancer, so these things don’t surprise me, but it is still sad. My mother enjoyed having him in her life—that’s WHY she moved to Texas sixteen years ago. I think I feel the most about all this when I think about what she’s about to go through. I also think about how she has the same degenerative lung disease and is a year or two behind where he was in its progression.
Mostly, I think about distant memories. Before my grandfather died, I saw my uncle a lot more often. My memories of a much younger man being patient and loving with his wall-bouncing ADHD (“hyperactive,” they called it back then) nephew were among my earliest. I didn’t appreciate the patience then, but I get it now.
But my family is stoic. Not detached, but just rarely sentimental. We know we’re there. There’s no need to visit every holiday. Our connections were always stronger in calm silence. The meal was enough. They said, “You live far away, but you’re important.” And that was true in both directions.
He knew he was dying. Not like we’re all dying or even someone with the last stages of COPD is dying, but like someone who might better measure their remaining time in days instead of weeks or months. I’m not sure the people around him were listening, but it sounded like he knew. He didn’t want to eat. He watched his O2 numbers crash while doing everyday things. I hope it was gentle and he wasn’t scared.
I have a desperately small family—especially since my bio-dad wasn’t on the scene and my step-dad shat the bed. There’s Mom. One uncle (the one I’m talking about) and his wife. And a cousin whom I see maybe twice a decade. That’s really about it. Most of my “family” has always been chosen, and my circle close. People with big families and wide nets often don’t understand what a big deal it is when someone with a tiny family truly invites someone in.
He was a Texas Democrat who really LISTENED to my social justice stuff and took it in. He read my endless social media rantings. Feminism (but no SWERF and TERF). Ableism. All the ‑isms. He was curious in a way that most people play at, but few actually achieve—hungry to understand people and life and THEIR experiences. But perhaps most importantly, hungry to figure out how to do better by the world, and he knew that to do that, he couldn’t imagine for a moment that he had all the answers already. He could have been a typical Texas neolib centrist who thought supporting the DNC was fighting the good fight and told his pinko nephew from California to “shut your woke face, now is not the time,” but he never was. He evolved. He grew. He was a better, more socially progressive person in his 70s than most people I know half his age with similar left leanings.
In many ways, he was the progenitor of who I became as a human. I see a lot of myself in him and who he was. If there’s a part of me that believes masculinity can be nurturing, loving, kind, sensitive, and compassionate, I owe no small part of it to him. Lots of emotional labor for his family. Lots of compassion. Lots of gentleness. A calm willingness to listen without judgement. I was too young to understand how behavior modeling worked, and his example, but he showed me masculinity could be kind, artistic, and vulnerable. He might not have realized it, and I certainly didn’t, but between him and my grandfather, I think I learned more about a non-toxic version of masculinity from them than any other men. (My step-father arrived on the scene after most of those formative memories were already uploaded to the mothership.)
He was not a perfect human. But he was GOOD. And good in a way that those who survive him will lovingly smudge the rough edges away and leave his memory burnished. At least I will.
We are diminished.
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