Remembering Uncle Tom
I found out that my Uncle Tom was dying the week before Thanksgiving. It was a Sunday. I was walking south on Laguna Street in San Francisco, on my way to my weekly Whole Foods stop which I’d begun to pride myself on completing before 9AM. It was just as I was crossing Haight, sipping from a cup of Blue Bottle pour over that I’d become inured to paying $3.90 for, the soft light of the morning making a soft smoke of the coffee’s condensation, that my mom called and said that my Uncle Tom had a tumor the size of a baseball in his liver. He had a few weeks left.
My Uncle Tom was, in fact, my great uncle. He was 92 years old and he hadn’t been doing well for a while. He had stopped golfing, something he’d done at least once a week for as long as I could remember. His jolly Henry VIII paunch had given way to a thinness that would have been welcomed as a healthy lifestyle change twenty years earlier, but was now hard not to see as a sign of decline. His gait was more a shuffle than a walk. He rarely took his scrappy, one-eyed dog on a walk anymore (the dog has since been adopted and regularly walked by my parents and regularly loathed by their cat). You could tell he was tired. So to say that my great uncle was now dying was really just to say that we knew what was wrong and could say with certainty how soon the end was. But he was still present and sharp. His handshake was still firm. And he didn’t act like he was on his way out. Just a few months before he had traded his Toyota in for a new Lexus. My mom asked him why he did this. “Eh,” he shrugged, “I needed a change.”
Uncle Tom and Aunt Marge (his wife, who passed away in 2005) had never had kids of their own, so they were a fixture at our Christmases, Thanksgivings, graduations, and Fourths of July. It’s the Christmases that are most distinct in my mind. Every year around five o’clock my family ends up in the kitchen, where my dad is dividing his attention between a beef tenderloin in the oven, mashed potatoes in a pot, and some kind of vegetable in a pan. My brothers and I, usually each wearing a pair of socks that had been under the tree just that morning, sit in the kitchen, drinking cocktails and cracking jokes, waiting for my extended family to start coming in from the cold. I’d hear the front door open and close and then there would be Uncle Tom coming down the hallway in his overcoat and an old fedora, carrying an expensive bottle of wine, a big grin on his face. He’d greet each of us with a meaty handshake and ask us how we were doing. He always called me “Gare.” At dinner, he would sit at the head of the table, lead the family in grace before the meal, and without fail restate his appreciation for Casablanca whenever we’d inevitably start talking about movies.
I read one time that it isn’t until some six to twelve months after we are born that we develop ‘Object Permanence,’ or the idea that just because we aren’t seeing something right now it doesn’t mean it no longer exists. This is why playing peekaboo with an infant is a riot at one month and elicits, at best, a contented gurgling at another. It’s difficult to imagine: that there was a time in your life when you were truly living in the moment, if only because that moment was all there was.
I think there’s an analogue here to something we come to understand much later: that the people in our lives are more than just what we experience them to be. Of course we all know even at a young age, in a nominal sense, that the people around us continue to live their lives when we aren’t around. But gaining a deep appreciation for it requires outgrowing one’s innate narcissism to come to a seemingly banal realization: that the people who have always been in our lives are, in fact, people. That they are, as we’ve always known ourselves to be, the summation of their experiences, their thoughts, their nature, their nurture, their past, their plans for the future, their friends, the books they’ve read, their regrets, their dreams that have come true, and their dreams that haven’t.
I don’t know when this happened for me in relation to my parents, maybe in college or maybe high school, but whenever it was it was certainly later than it should have been. I can remember the few times in middle school or high school when one of my parents would be quick to anger or unusually short with us or just irritable for what seemed to me like no good reason. “Man,” I’d think to myself “what’s up with them?” Why, I was thinking, implicitly, were my parents not being the way I want them to be when I want them to be? The moment when I finally appreciated that their being a parent to me was not the totality of their existence — when I considered that, just maybe, during the intervening ten hours when I left for school in the morning and their coming home from work, they’d had a bad day because of something that had nothing to do with me — coupled with how long it had taken me to realize this, was possibly the most ashamed I’d ever felt in my life.
The time that happened for me with my Uncle Tom actually came from a story my dad had heard from him and relayed to me. Imagine this: my Uncle Tom is a young man and in the Navy during World War II. He has been at sea for years aboard the battleship USS Alabama, having traveled to Scotland and Norway before passing through the Panama Canal en route to hop around the outlying islands of the Pacific. One day they come into port in Guam or Fiji or one of the other countless islands between Hawaii and Japan that had the terrible misfortune of being strategically important. He and the other sailors are given leave to disembark. The story is light on details here, but I imagine there are other ships of different sizes and purposes also at port or anchored out at sea, warplanes flying overhead, soldiers and sailors everywhere, jeeps speeding around on improvised roads, rows of green or tan canvas field tents housing anything from a barber to a recovery ward to typists to a bunch of high ranking officers bent over a map. He’s at ease with his feet on solid ground, where he doesn’t have to wonder if he is about to be blown up or drowned.
That ease is abruptly interrupted as he hears over the PA system, among a list of otherwise unremarkable announcements, his name called out, asking him to report to some tent or dock or whatever. He tells his friends that he will catch up with them later. Bewildered and with some trepidation, he heads to where he was instructed, surely thinking of all of the bad news that could be waiting for him there. And when he gets to the specified point on some island in the Pacific Ocean, thousands of miles away from his native Philadelphia, he finds his brother, a sailor like himself also in port, who had seen that Uncle Tom’s ship was docked and had asked someone to page him. That’s end of the story. At this point in its telling, my dad says, Uncle Tom started getting emotional. Uncle Tom and his brother haven’t seen each other for years, each off on their war. And then there they are, each carried in a strange ship to a strange place. A story like that has a way of changing your view of a person.
I don’t know that I had ever heard Uncle Tom talk about his family or the war before then and, if I had, it certainly wasn’t because I had asked him. There is a lesson here of course: I should have gone out of my way during the holidays to ask him about these things when I had the chance. What you’ll often hear in an elegy is that this, the failure to truly get to know the people in your life while you had the chance, is the bitter compounding of tragedy upon tragedy. But it doesn’t feel quite right. It is true that my understanding of him would have been enriched if I had been more deliberate about spending some one-on-one time with him. In his later years he lived fifteen minutes from my parents’ house. I think he probably would have been thrilled if I said I wanted to come over and drink some scotch and just hang out for a while or watch the Eagles game or get a quick dinner at his regular red-sauce joint, Carollo’s. Of course I never did.
But to focus on that missed opportunity seems to me like a variation of that same vanity that had made me so ashamed before: I don’t have to be welcomed into his experience for it to have happened. Uncle Tom’s life, in all its 92 years — growing up in Philadelphia, his adolescent and teenage years, shipping off to the Pacific, marrying my Aunt Marge, watching his nieces and nephews become adults and having children of their own, making his annual pilgrimages with his friends to golf in Florida, the passing of my Aunt Marge — all happened. My knowing his life’s details doesn’t memorialize it or lend it any new significance. It was always significant. It was significant simply because it happened and because it happened to him.
The last time I saw Uncle Tom was the day after Thanksgiving, which he had been too exhausted to attend. My family went over to his place to see him for what was obvious to everyone present would be the last time for me and my brothers, who would be flying back to our corners of the country in the next few days. He spent almost the whole time in his easy chair. We didn’t talk about much — when each of us brothers would be flying home, how his dog was doing. It’s hard to know what to talk about in a moment like that. It’s surreal, to know that you are speaking your final words to someone. You become keenly aware that so much of your standard conversation — movies you want to see, books you recommend, places you’d like to go — is predicated on a sense of continuity, the certainty that everyone involved is rich with time to spend. It feels obscene in a way, to be draped in a sumptuous finery encrusted with your abundance of hours, days, weeks, and years when you’re with someone who has so little left.
When we got up to go he managed to stand up to say goodbye. He shook my hand and said, “Nice knowing you Gare.” This reads as hopelessly macabre, but it wasn’t. It was a simple, matter of fact statement, not mournful, not withering, not imbued with some grave finality. It was just a farewell spoken as if he accepted what was coming and didn’t see the point in making a big deal of it.
There’s a comedy bit from by Tom Segura that I find hilarious. To have the full effect you have to understand something about the comedian himself and his delivery. Tom Segura is chubby and in his late 30s. He looks like the guy who you find, upon entering what was supposed to be a civilized Christmas party, loaded on eggnog and sweating through a cheap Santa costume. He isn’t speaking in the depressed monotone that the subject might warrant, but rather a sort of bafflement:
You guys, are you ever just tired of being alive? — Know what I mean? Like I’m not suicidal. I just feel like I’ve done a lot and I’ve seen a lot. And now I’m like, you know like — “Let’s wrap this shit up.” Right? Like, how many days are there?
It’s funny because Tom Segura is so obviously not on the precipice of death. But, like the best comedy, it speaks to a certain truth. Though it’s not yet true for him, it’s not hard to imagine that one can reach the end of their life and know it’s been long and full, that they have done a lot and seen a lot, and are now ready to wrap it up.
On that last visit my Dad asked Uncle Tom about his time in the Navy and whether or not they were allowed to grow facial hair. He grinned. “Jesus Kent,” he said, “I don’t know — that was 70 years ago!” We all chuckled. Seventy years. A thing like that! He lived more than two of my own lifetimes after he served in World War II. He’d just had the time to really accept what waits for us all, and that had been waiting for him for 92 years. I think his unsentimental tone when he said goodbye to me was just a recognition of that fact. He seemed weary that day, but also content, as if he was at the end of a long trip and would finally be going home.
After I flew out and was comfortably back in California, back to my routines, my work, and my $3.90 coffee, Uncle Tom continued to decline. He was getting hospice care so he would be dying in his home, which my mom and her siblings were in and out of through the end. She told me that he slept a lot in his last few days, not eating, only drinking a few sips of water here and there. He was spent. A few times, though, he’d muster the strength to get up to go to the bathroom, and she said he was in those moments alert and cheerful. It’s a sad image in some ways to be sure, a frail man in the final days of his life, hanging on to the last of his dignity by willing himself to get up and go to the bathroom on his own. But it’s a fitting one in my mind. There was Tom Grady — World War II veteran, retired detective, avid golfer, and discerning Scotch drinker — facing his death upright like a man and in the way I had always known him: affable, bright-eyed, and smiling.
