All That Remains

My uncle, my father's brother Lawrence, passed away this week after a long illness. Unfortunately, this is not the saddest part of this story. In many ways, his passing was a blessing after so much suffering. The saddest part to me is the relationship between his branch of the family and mine had become virtually non-existent over the years, and so, we found out he passed not from my aunt or cousins, but from a family friend who happened to tell my mother's sister, assuming she knew.

As I checked my cousin's Facebook page for confirmation of his passing, I was struck by some comments people had written about my uncle -- things I had never known, like that he, a Captain in the NYPD, was one of the first officers on the scene the night John Lennon was shot. It made me wonder how much more I never knew about him, and even still, how much he never knew and will never know now about my own family. And ever a romantic dreamer, it made me wish that things had turned out differently -- that instead of finding this out from a stranger's comment, that I had my own memories, "Uncle Larry, tell us again what happened the night John Lennon was killed."

Sadder still, stories like these aren't rare: they're all too common. But it still mystifies me how they happen. How do bonds disintegrate so much? How do things come to this state? How did we get here?

I think about my own nieces and nephews and how close we are, and how I can't imagine not having a relationship with them. I think about my mother's four siblings, their spouses and my many, many cousins, and how they have been so much a part of my life that I can't think of any major event that they haven't shared with me -- good or bad.

The relationship with my father's side of the family, at least in my lifetime, has always been awkward and strained, although I understand from my mother and from looking at old family photos, that that wasn't always the case. But time and circumstance change, people change.

My father was an alcoholic and became difficult to live with. As a result, my parents separated, but even when we weren't seeing my father regularly, my mother made sure that we kept in touch with his mother, my grandmother. And we would see my uncle Larry and his family whenever we visited my mother's mother, as he lived just down the block from her in the Bronx. We didn't see them very often -- perhaps a handful of times a year, but they were still a part of our lives, unlike my father's other siblings - a sister and a brother, technically a cousin that had been adopted by my grandmother when his own mother fell on hard times. They, for reasons I'm sure unique to each of them, which I will never know, stayed away.

When I was 14, my father was killed in an accident. I remember my mother getting the call that Saturday morning from my uncle. He had been struck by a car by a nurse coming home late at night from work. And as much as our lives were changed in that instant, I remember feeling sorry for that nurse, and how her life was changed too, how she was just coming home from a hard day at work and now she had accidentally taken a life. She, like my family, would never be the same, but at least, in some ways, we had been prepared that it could end like this. With an alcoholic/addict, you are always waiting for the other shoe to drop, for the phone to ring with another bit of bad news, but the fact that his death had happened in this way was shocking. In some ways, his death was freeing -- for him and for us. He didn't have to struggle anymore and we could know he was at peace.

We saw much of my father's family at his wake and funeral, where we felt like outsiders. My parents had never technically divorced and it was certainly awkward seeing relatives I had never met or hadn't seen in years. Not exactly the time for a happy family reunion.

After that day, the distance grew wider. We didn't hear from my uncle as much. We would sometimes see him on television, on the nightly news. High-ranking in the NYPD, he would often be the spokesperson for various cases and we would see him sharing news of some big arrest or the details of some horrific crime. Whenever I would see him, I'd feel proud and wistful -- what if my own dad's life had gone differently, he was in the NYPD too, maybe that would be him instead of my uncle? But that wasn't his path in life.

As the time moved on, phone calls placed weren't always returned. Still, when my grandmother passed, he did let us know and my sisters were able to go and pay their respects. After she was gone, it seemed like the bonds were even more strained, as if it was out of respect for her that he stayed in touch. And since then, we rarely heard from them.

In the last few years, I noticed my uncle and cousin were on Facebook; I friended them but we didn't really communicate beyond that. Then two years ago, my father's cousin, a man I'd never met, reached out -- like many men of his age, he had retired and become interested in genealogy and had found me through my uncle's Facebook page. We struck up a strangely comforting e-mail exchange -- he shared stories of my dad as a child, in happier times, said how much he had admired and loved him, and how much my father, even as a child, had taken care of them. He talked about his own struggle with alcoholism and how it had destroyed so much of their -- our -- extended family.

He let me know he had reconnected after many years with my uncle, and, as a result, had discovered that he, and my father's other relatives, thought that there was ill will harbored on my side of the family; I assured him there wasn't and asked him to please extend that message to all who would listen. My family never had any ill will toward any of our relatives, largely because, as the saying goes, "Holding a grudge is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die." There's just no point to it.

About a year later, late on a Saturday night, my phone rang with an unfamiliar number. At a noisy event, I didn't pick up. When I retrieved the message, it was my uncle Larry, but his words were incoherent. Surprised and thrown off, I didn't know how to handle the call. I hadn't spoken to him in 20 plus years. Soon after, I heard from my cousin, who let me know he wasn't well and that he really wanted to talk to me. "Absolutely," I said, "Just let me know when."

I'm not sure what happened after that, but I never heard back. We never had our call. I try not to spend too much time wishing that I had picked up the phone that night, but, being obsessive, I can't help myself.

My mother later heard from his wife, my aunt, that my uncle wasn't well at all, and that he was no longer lucid. What he was sick with, they wouldn't say, so we don't know. Irish people have a long history of never admitting health issues and other weaknesses and instead use euphemisms. I can't count how many relatives died of the "winter disease" or the "summer disease." This makes giving my medical history at the doctor's very interesting as we'll never know exactly what those conditions were; the "winter disease" isn't exactly in the medical books.

And it was through Facebook I learned last week he had been admitted to hospice, and yesterday, we learned he passed, again, through a friend of my mother's sister, who mentioned it casually, as if my aunt knew. My aunt called my mother, assuming she did indeed know. Because it wouldn't be off base to assume that, but alas, we did not.

I'm not sad that my uncle passed; from what I understand, his body and mind had deteriorated to a point where his life was no longer a life. I'm sad for my cousins and my aunt, and everyone who knew and loved my uncle -- and that includes my mother, sisters, and me. I'm sad for any time he may have spent wishing that things were different without knowing how to fix them. He and my dad, and their siblings, didn't have an easy life and as a result, none of them communicated their feelings well. Perhaps he just wasn't sure what to do to rebuild our relationship. Most of all, I'm sad for how things turned out, and what they could have been.

They say that when you know better, you do better. When my dad died, I learned a lesson in how not to leave things unsaid. We weren't in good touch then; when he would call, often after a few too many, I would refuse to speak with him. I was a child and I couldn't handle it. He died shortly after his birthday. I had sent a birthday card to his last known address, but he moved around a lot. Several days after he died, his birthday card was returned to me, "No longer at this address." I never forgot that. It was a lesson to me to not let anything -- good or bad -- go unsaid with the people you care about. I'm not saying that I'm 100% successful at it, but since that day, I've tried my best to do better.

And my uncle's passing is another reminder - a reminder to do better, but to also realize that everyone has their own holes to fill, and crosses to bear, and sometimes, no matter how much we want relationships and situations to be different, sometimes they just can't be, and we have to accept that.

I hope that my uncle is in a better place now, ideally reunited with my father and others who have passed before, and I hope they both know that, when we see each other again, there needn't be any awkwardness. We've already wasted too much time on that.

But I can tell you this: I am SO going to want to hear the one about John Lennon.