Let me rephrase that. My family has suffered loss over the past month.
Mere weeks ago we lost my father in law, a man that I never got to know as well as I would have liked. Roy was nice enough to me, and I've seen him with his youngest grandchild, my nephew Damien enough to know that regardless what else he was, or what other attitudes and traits he had, the man loved his family. How his face would light up when his granddaughter would enter a room, or at the sight of his daughter, my wife, whether she noticed it or not.
I will say that, in the past few years, I have heard plenty about him, and before moving to Las Vegas was preparing myself for life in yet another city with difficult family members and their drama. Such was not the case with Roy, and, since his passing, since before it after we arrived, I heard a different side from his two children, my brother in law Eric and of course my wife. I met a man that was not the Roy described to me in the past, and I have heard very little about that man since. Instead he has been remembered for what he became. Opinionated, stubborn and generally well meaning. Above all else, dad.
Roy is described as some of us describe our parents, remembered fondly for some of his quirks or something humorous he'd said or done, someone we love dearly but don't always understand or agree with. No monsters in any of these tales, and no animosity from those he may have slighted in the past. These things may not be forgotten by all, but they do seem to have been forgiven, and don't carry enough weight on any he left behind to be worth mentioning.
As it should be.
I got a message today from my youngest sister letting me know that my uncle Dave passed away a few nights ago. He represents one of the only two family members I left in that city that I cared about. The other is my other sister, the middle child of us three.
This one stings a bit more, I grew up knowing him.
You always hear, " He was so young." and " I would never have expected that."
In the case of my uncle, that is very true. And also not.
He has been fighting cancer now for a couple of years, a couple of years that seem to me a decade, and to him likely seemed an eternity.
My uncle, to my knowledge never engaged in any of the habits that we are constantly told lead to disease and death. The worst item I know of that he'd ever ingested was Coca-Cola, and never at any outrageous rate or quantity.
But he got cancer.
I would never have expected that.
My uncle died of cancer, kemo, infection and related traumas in his early fifties.
He was so young.
Let me tell you about my uncle Dave.
Dave was largely an unknown, undefined quantity in my life. I know it was him that drove several hundred miles with me in the back seat crazed with chicken pox when I was four in order to get me to Denver from the farm we lived on. I remember the tow truck he'd bought me to replace my dump truck that was destroyed when I was hit by a car the same year.
I thought for most of my youth he'd bought me a tow truck instead of a dump truck because he was more into cars and racing than my dad, who had driven a dump truck in reality. I wonder now if it was that he'd made a gesture to have a common ground with a child he didn't necessarily understand himself. Or maybe they were just out of dump trucks.
Dave never married, that I'm aware of. I can't hold that against him considering the shining examples of wedded bliss the rest of this family has shown him. I don't know if the prospect ever held any attraction for him or not. To be honest, I never really knew him socially, he may well have been as awkward around women as some of my friends that have never gone there are. There may be other reasons, none of which I'd hold against him. Dave was who he was.
He always had an amused look on his face. For as long as I'd known him, as though he had one eye on the Indy 500 and one recording all the ruckus and silliness around him. He seemed to me the very best people watcher, and likely had more insight into any of my family, myself included, and our psychiatric profiles than we ourselves had.
I remember this, he was smart. Very, very smart.
Maybe he'd figured out that he was too damned smart to speak much without somehow seeming off-putting to the rest of us. Maybe he was smart enough to figure out that if he did speak much, someone in the family would take something he said out of context and hold against him until he or they died.
I do know that there is another half of him that I never got to observe. He kept his social life as far removed from his parent's home, and the rest of the family as possible. I have imagined what these phantom friends might look like a thousand times. What interests they may have, or what sort of home they lived in. Maybe these names were actually the family he'd started under an assumed name and he was living a double life. Doubtful, but these were the sorts of things that went through my head growing up.
Above all else, I will remember this about my uncle Dave:
He accepted me. If there were conditions on that acceptance, they were never made known to me, and I never felt that I hadn't lived up to them. He accepted my mother, a divorced single mom who married his brother. Again I was never made aware, on purpose or by accident, of any stipulations tacked to that acceptance. He accepted us at the beginning of the marriage, and as far as I know, still did at the end of his life. If he thought himself anything but her brother in law and my uncle I never knew about it.
He accepted my wife, and her children. Indeed for a time, I was well on my way to learning more about the man because of his building friendship with my wife. He made her and the children feel welcomed. Growing up and well into adulthood at dinners he was almost exclusively talking to my dad. One dinner in the past few years saw him talking to my wife more than any other person present, and more so even than I'd ever seen him speak to my father in one sitting.
If he didn't approve, or accept her, or the kids, or our marriage, none of us ever knew it.
That is key.
My uncle Dave never, under any circumstances, ever, made any of us feel that we were being judged, or that we were unfit for admittance into his family and his life. If he felt otherwise, he was kind enough, caring enough to keep it to himself.
That hasn't always been the case with everyone in this family.
He remains the only person in this side of my twisted and unkempt family tree that never made me feel bad about myself, or less than a person.
He and I may not have understood or known everything there was to know about each other, but he was my uncle and I was his nephew and we were family.
That was really all that mattered.
I will miss him. I am saddened by the loss and a piece of the puzzle that made up who I am is now forever lost and some mysteries will likely go unsolved, but I am happier knowing that he's no longer bound by that horrible hospital bed, and the pain and nausea, no longer plagued by the drugs administered to " keep him comfortable", and no longer being betrayed and imprisoned by his own body.
That much at least is a relief.