| Death Comes Calling Late Fall 2003 I lost an uncle recently, and he is the first to go. Death has slipped into my family, and inside I know that the cycle has begun. He used to make me laugh so much when I was a child. Actually, I was a little scared of him, but it was the kind of scared that was exciting and fun. It was his deep, gravelly voice, his cowboy boots and huge, shiny belt buckle. It was the way he would pop his teeth out with his tongue and stick that tongue out at me, the teeth laying there, scaring and fascinating the hell out of me. Throughout my life he was there: a welcome presence, but we shared no special bond. Like my other uncles, he would tease me for being an "enamorada," falling in love so frequently, and then just as easily dumping each love. Later in my life, when I didn't have a car and would have to take the bus home from the university, he would see me walking home from the bus stop, and he would abandon his friends and their never-ending dissertations on Cuba, and drive me the five blocks to my house. It was such a warm, protective gesture, and no amount of protesting on my part ever did any good. He would drive me home, give me a kiss, and say good-bye until the next time our paths crossed on the intersection of NW 22 Avenue and NW 11 Street. And he has been the first to go. Because this is not the same as losing a grandparent, because on some level, you always know that your grandparents are old, were always old, and so their death is not as shocking. But aunts, uncles, parents, siblings, the cousins you grow up with as if they were your own siblings. This is a category unto itself, hitting close to home because these are the relatives whose death you never imagine, never accept that they will happen -- until it is happening and you realize that you have entered a phase in your life where the deaths will become more frequent, and there is no way of knowing who will be next. Death has entered, and I suspect it will give us many frights before it claims another victim. How much longer will my uncle with Alzheimer's suffer? He who was once so jovial, larger than life with his gaudy jewelry and unbelievable stories about his adventures in Brazil and China, always, always bringing each and every sibling and in-law and niece and nephew some memento from each journey... now he is reduced to an old man who sits in a wheelchair all day, staring into space and believing that his barber from his hometown in Cuba, the same town he left over 40 years ago, has just cut his hair. That is the cruelty of death, that those who would find greatest relief in it are denied it, while those who love them have to watch them wither, lose their minds, their mobility, their memories. The recent realization about death's entrance into my world first hit me in the hours when I believed my father was dying. Amid the confusion of the accident and his injuries and his blood pressure and the hours spent in surgery, I felt that I would lose him. It was precisely because he was conscious and alert and the injuries were not life-threatening that I believed he would die. Every time the doctor said he was doing fine I cursed him, because it seemed that it would be then that death would take him, just as we believed the worst was over, just as we accepted that his life was not in danger. Isn't that how it happens? Everyone believes the patient is just fine, and then, in the blink of an eye the heart gives and it's all over. We will need each other more than ever from this moment forward. And as permanent loss is now ours, may we find in each other the love and solace we need to keep living. |
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| Image copyright DC Comics 1979 |