Uncle Richard: My Perception

Death sets a thing significant
The eye had hurried by

My uncle Richard passed away at around ten o’clock last night.
His body got tired of his abuse… and gave up.

This isn’t much of a time to console me. I hardly knew my uncle, so the loss doesn’t hit me particularly brutally. There’s much more to be considered with my father. The first brother he’s ever lost… and the only true brother he will ever lose (one does not count the half brother he hardly knows and who has hardly given my father even an afterthought throughout his many years on earth). To hear my dad lament how he’s faced too much sadness recently could connect with any son’s heart, regardless of how detached that son may be emotionally from his blood family. "David," he says to me, "Richard was just always there for me, I just wish I could be there for him." Let me add that my father’s strained voice, struggling through a contracting throat hardened with pain, is one of the most heart-wrenching sounds for me. It’s the sound of a man who really doesn’t know what to do with this sadness that has caught him off-guard. I guess no one really knows how to handle sadness when it comes… but my dad’s suffering holds a unique quality for me, which surely exists solely within me more than as an objective reality.

Though my uncle’s death doesn’t hit me on a personal level due to a lack of knowing much about him, one tends to construct some form of identity for the unknown in the situations. One uses the random memories and experiences collected over the years to define a soul. I have chosen to see this man as one who never dealt anyone harm, because he was too busy hurting himself for being such a failure and an embarrassment to all those who had ever loved him. All I remember of him is a playful pan-like figure. I don’t recall him ever getting angry, ugly or spiteful with anyone. There were just jokes and games and his rough-around-the-edge, crude personality. Every now and then though, you could see a flash of self-awareness float across his eyes like a cloud. If you looked closely, if you paid enough attention, you could read in those eyes, "Yes, I know I’ve wasted my life and never offered anything of value to anyone… but do you have to always remind me with your jokes?" But no one ever did pay attention and he laughed on with the rest after the momentary lapse, because he never wanted any negative feelings raised with anyone. He knew sadness too well and wanted to make sure that no one he loved would ever lack a smile for as long as he lived… particularly his baby brother.

And he probably felt this to the end. Another person to die before the weight of a lifetime of sadness could be lifted by anyone with even a mustard seed of effort to spare. And he died without knowing that a nephew whom he hardly knew might come up with such a noble identity for him… that just may have been the most accurate perception of him of all who ever knew him. And he probably died not knowing his old auto shop, with the ancient candy vending machine and the multiple broke-down, abandoned Volkswagen buses to climb through and the pond with the ducks and donkeys and geese… that this fantasy land rivaled Disneyland in the heart of his young nephew so many years ago.

And his nephew will never know if knowing this might have lightened his uncle’s load in any way.

I just figure he was probably worth my love, if I was there to give him it. I mean, the dude gave me a coin engraved with a topless woman’s breasts as heads and an ass for tails when I was a kid. I don’t think I had even grown pubes yet. It was one of the most mysterious gifts I had ever received… and he specifically entered my room alone one day to give it to me privately, likely knowing my mother wouldn’t approve… which she didn’t, when it fell through a hole in my pocket to the carpet, forever leaving my possession the instant she discovered it. The coin will always be a legendary, lost relic to me. Was it his attempt to be more of an uncle to me? Had he anticipated offering it to me for hours before handing it to me? Did he see it and immediately decide it was destined for me?

I’ll never know what inspired him to give me that coin. Me… a nephew he hardly knew.