I remember Uncle Bob, but I don’t. He was the uncle I saw the least and knew the less. Maybe that’s why in my child mind, he remains my favorite uncle. Uncle Bob was like magic – red haired and fair skinned, he was so different from me, the clone of my Dad. And he was tall. In my child mind, he was a giant. He could and did lift me up so my head touched the ceiling. My Dad never did that. (I think he was too short – or maybe he didn’t know how to have fun like Uncle Bob. Or maybe lifting little girls up to the ceiling is the job of uncles.) So I remember being a giddy girl seeing Uncle Bob coming into the house where Grandma and Grandpa lived. Did I beg him to lift me up? I think so. And he always did. With a twirl and a whirl the hair on my head gently grazed the ceiling and back down I went.
It was over too quickly, this intimate face-to-face lifting in joy moment of an uncle who would later die a painful and agonizing death in the remove of his bedroom where I never went for he did not want to see or be seen and where somehow that – the dying – became more real than the living. How does that happen? How does it happen that a moment, a breath, even months or years of a dying erases decades of a living? Now I remember Uncle Bob the way I want to – the way he was when I was a little girl – and he is smiling again. And it is good.
It was over too quickly, this intimate face-to-face lifting in joy moment of an uncle who would later die a painful and agonizing death in the remove of his bedroom where I never went for he did not want to see or be seen and where somehow that – the dying – became more real than the living. How does that happen? How does it happen that a moment, a breath, even months or years of a dying erases decades of a living? Now I remember Uncle Bob the way I want to – the way he was when I was a little girl – and he is smiling again. And it is good.
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