A Very Private Grief
An uncle passed the other evening. While not exactly close in recent times, I have stayed in touch, as best I can. Made a few long detours to check up on him, some years back.
Perhaps I’m missing something, but there is that elegiac tone.
HIs wife, my aunt, showed up in dreams, some time recently, merry and smiling. With no further investigation, I’ll gladly assume they are happy and together.
A Very Private Grief
There’s a laugh, my uncle had, a way his shoulders shook when he was tickled with mirth. Sometimes it was whimsical irony, and other times it obvious sexual innuendo with bawdy humor. It was a very physical and outward display of happiness, in one form.
A raconteur, of sorts, and the tales got longer as he aged. Longer and possibly taller. Facts have always been highly mutable in my family — a birthright.
A Very Private Grief
One story emerged during the service that bears repeating. My uncle was a surgeon, and back in the dim recesses of time, it was much easier to obtain experimental medical cadavers to dissect; however the local school, morgue, I wasn’t clear on where this was, but the place didn’t offer good refrigeration services post post-mortem. At the time, my uncle and associates would just store the extra body parts in his freezer — at home.
So he and my aunt were out of town for a skiing trip, always the consummate outdoorsman, and the grandmother figure left to babysit my four cousins? My aunt told her that there was casserole in the freezer.
Apparently, that wasn’t what she found.
According to anecdotal evidence, “It was clearly a man’s foot, ankle and all. (Grandmother-figure) fainted.”
A Very Private Grief
Coming through the inlets, up from SeaTac, bending around the bay, and then, over the Hood Canal Bridge, the mountains snow-capped and ragged, competing with low-flying clouds, and the road itself became a tunnel of trees. From suburban Dallas to windswept Oklahoma, dirt, dust, more dirt, hot summers, torpid winters? It is particularly easy to fall in love with place that is so different from what one knows. Which explains why my uncle settled him and his family here.
On one side is the Straits of Juan de Fuca, the northern-most line of the continental United States, and the other side is Hurricane Ridge, the facing edge of the Olympic Mountains. It’s easy to see the majesty of the gods in the place.
From the old house, down the hill, the Victoria Ferry — the car/people boat that transfers to Victoria — Victoria, Canada. Can hear the ferry’s horn booming in the morning, seeing a line of cars get ready to pull on and traverse the straits.
Out the back window of the same place, Hurricane Ridge.
Perfectly chosen. Perfect location.
A Very Private Grief
But it is, at the core, a very private grief. The last years were not kind to him. I recall a robust and inquisitive man, short of stature but big of heart. Loved the out-of-doors and loved family.
Above all, loved family.
Religious, but more along the spiritual lines, a lightweight Lutheran, and we did talk about it, briefly. Aries, not that it matters, with an infectious giggle that might've been a laugh.
As much as anything, though, he would worship in the great outdoors, chasing a life on the barren, wind-swept peninsula with, at one time, the Olympic National Park as his backyard.
A Very Private Grief
God Speed.
