[Today’s run: 3.4 miles]
Already this week my 93 year old neighbor died, then my Uncle Jerry Brown died. My father is quickly fading. All of these people well over 80 years of age. So I feel a strange mixture of sorrow and relief.
Sometime when my grandparents were getting up in years my father said a deep and obvious thing. He had a way of doing that. This time it was, “If you don’t die you get old.” Obviously. But there is a hidden subtext: If you don’t die you get old, and then you die.
So, I’m going to a funeral for the neighbor on Friday. She was 93. She was born on Leap Day, February 29, and we had fun a year ago when she had her 23rd birthday. She lived through a lot of change in the Deep South. When we were moving into this house I stopped by her place to say hello. She had a sign on the door that said something about not taking packages and deliveries for other people. I knocked and she answered. I told her we might be moving in and she was not impressed.
She didn’t really get out of the house much. When we first came on the scene she was still driving her car to church and to town. Over the years that fell away. She was the center of a lively family and it seemed like they were always visiting, singly and in small bunches.
We had a block party, and she didn’t come out for that but her son did the cooking on his grill.
Last year we sent her a birthday present which included a stuffed bear and a tiara. I’m not sure why that seemed appropriate, but word got back to us that she enjoyed the gift. A few months ago she invited us over for a chat and that was very pleasant. She sent us a Christmas card.
I just got off the phone with her son. I told him that, even though she wasn’t out much, she really set the pace for the neighborhood. People didn’t mess around. It was a family neighborhood and most of it was her family.
I don’t have a link to the obituary for my Uncle Jerry. I heard from my cousin that he committed suicide somewhere in Arizona.
He was kind of a tragic figure. He was the father to half of my cousins (I think I counted right), but I don’t remember seeing him very many times. In the middling past I would hear about him through my mother via my other Uncle, who passed away 3-4 years ago. Jerry was in the Pacific Northwest, Jerry was in Reno, Vegas, he lived in a van.
Then a few years ago I saw him on Facebook and at least got a bit connected. I don’t know what kind of work he did or where he lived, but he would “like” things occasionally, and sometimes posted politically progressive memes which might get some pushback from other relatives.
My wife and I have talked about him and whether his black sheep status was the result of some form of mental illness. To me he seemed mostly kind of new-agey. He didn’t go very deep on Facebook. My mother had a hard time with his strange ideas. But not very long ago she told us he had brain surgery when he was a boy. So there must have been some reason for that.
One thing he said recently on Facebook was that his parents, with a young family in the Great Depression, put a high value on independence and figuring out how to do things on one’s own. I asked my mother about that recently and she agreed that it was true. Every family has it’s quirks and oddballs and we can wonder whether he would have done better in a more medically advanced generation.
So both of my natal Uncles are gone now. They were wanderers and westerners.
