I had a conversation with a couple of former students a few weeks ago, at the end of June, and in that conversation one of them mentioned that their mother had had to leave town unexpectedly because their uncle was dying. I expressed sympathy and was, for a moment, rather taken aback at how little concern the student was showing. The explanation came a few moments later; they simply weren’t that close with that side of the family, and that particular uncle was someone they barely knew. Mom had apparently expressed her own lack of desire to leave and had done so purely out of a feeling of obligation.
I thought about it for a moment. I get it, I said. I have a few uncles myself who I probably wouldn’t mourn all that much.
My mother passed away in January of 2020. If you were to read her obituary, you would come upon the sentence Cremation will take place, and a celebration of life will occur at a later date. It is now July of 2023. That “later date” was meant to be a couple of months later, enough time to let everyone recover from the immediate shock and to give a family scattered across the country some time to gather.
You may be a step ahead of me in realizing what happened instead, and as of today my mother has never had a formal funeral. Her ashes– this is in accordance with her expressed wishes, for the record– are in my hallway closet, perhaps twenty feet from where I’m sitting right now. “You just keep me until Dad dies,” she told me, “and then scatter us somewhere.” She left no will or any other end-of-life instructions. Honestly, everyone just sort of took my word for it.
(That’s what she told me. I promise.)
Perhaps you have put two and two together already, given that I have yet to reveal the identity of the handsome gentleman who sits atop this post, and given said handsome gentleman’s fine taste in hats and facial hair. The same night– the exact same fucking night— I texted that sentence about having uncles who I probably wouldn’t mourn very much, I got a text from my brother that my uncle Bruce was dead. I don’t know the date of his death, and I doubt I ever will; he was found in his apartment, and I don’t know who by. My uncle Jim got in touch with my brother and he told me.
Bruce was my dad’s younger brother, by only a couple of years; he was 69 or 70, I think. Dad is the oldest of four, and Bruce was the second-born, followed by my aunt Lori and then Jim. Lori and Jim are far enough removed from my dad that Lori babysat us when we were kids, and I believe both still lived at home with my grandmother when my brother and I were very young. I have not spoken to Bruce or seen him in at least fifteen years, and I don’t think I’ve talked to Dad’s other siblings since the boy was an infant.
We just … don’t really talk to that side of the family, all that much. There are reasons. I won’t share them here– I’m sure you can find a way to forgive me– and honestly I probably don’t know them all.
Bruce lived in Chicago for most of his life. He lived there the entire time I was there, but I only saw him a few times during the near-decade we were both Chicagoans. He moved around a lot, spending a lot of time in Jamaica. He introduced me to Bob Marley’s music, instantly cementing himself as someone responsible for a chunk of my brain development in high school. He once brought back some hand-woven bracelets from Kingstown and gave one to my brother and I for Christmas, and in response to our nonplussed reactions offered us, rather grandly (Bruce did everything rather grandly), to provide us with the cash equivalent instead. Which was perhaps $2, if we were lucky. He may not have actually had that much cash on him, either. I remember him finding me reading the novelization of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and asking me if I enjoyed it, a question that somehow led to him taking the book from me and quizzing me about it. I remember this story because I didn’t know the answer to the very first question he asked, from the very first page of the book– he asked how old Lao Che was, and I insisted that information wasn’t in the book at all, which is how I learned that the phrase pushing fifty means that one is nearly fifty years old.
I would guess he’s about my age or a little older in that picture up there, which would make it twenty-ish years ago. I’m not on Facebook, but his profile is public, and I was able to find his page and scroll through his pictures. And the thing is, I have no idea what he might have been fighting or struggling with toward the end of his life, but the most recent pictures were shocking. He’d lost a ton of weight, his beard now halfway down his chest and whiter than mine is. And he was old; that feeling would be inevitable given how long it had been since I’d seen him, but my dad’s younger brother now looked to have a decade on him at least. He looked like he’d been sick for a while when he passed. I have no idea what might have been wrong. He never mentioned anything being wrong, never said anything about a hard day, or being tired, or not feeling well.
The caption on nearly half the pictures? It’s a wonderful day to be alive. He had friends; there were tons of pictures of him with other people and lots of references to people and tags back and forth. But that quote kept coming up over and over again. It’s a wonderful day to be alive.
And now he is gone, and I’ve barely talked to him in two decades, and I somehow miss him anyway. I never missed him when he was alive. What kind of person does that make me? I don’t know.
We gave my uncle some time to get back to us about some sort of service and then, having heard nothing, I asked my brother to reach out to him again. Jim had said that he was going to go to Chicago to clean out his apartment and settle his affairs, which I suspect was not as big of a job as it might seem. He took a while to respond. He’d been busy with last-minute details for his son’s wedding– a wedding that no member of my family had been invited to– and said that “his cousins” were having a get-together later that week that he couldn’t attend. This is a direct quote: “There will probably be some reflection on Bruce’s life then.” Did my aunt come up from Florida for the wedding? They live in Michigan, not far from us. He didn’t go to this “get-together.” If the two of them were together recently, they did not bother to reach out to my father or to my brother and I.
My mother never got a funeral. Bruce, it seems, isn’t even going to get an obituary. My grandmother is buried in South Bend; my grandfather, who passed away when I was very young, is buried in a family plot in Arkansas. I have no idea whether he left any instructions about what to do with his remains when he was gone (and I kind of doubt it; Bruce was not a planner) and burying his ashes with his mother seems to be the cleanest solution, but right now I have no idea what’s become of him. I don’t know how he died. I don’t know when he died.
He mentioned having a cat, in one of the pictures. I hope one of his friends has it.
But hey. The cousins got together. There was probably some reflection.
I guess that’s going to have to be enough.
Welcome to infinitefreetime dot com 