End of an era

My mother's brother died about 1:30 this morning, and it's odd to consider life without him in it.

We have expected this for some time, especially since he went into hospice care a few weeks ago, but I'm not sure "expecting" can mean "ready for" death under any circumstances, and
when the death closes an important door, it's most just—weird.

Uncle was the youngest of my grandmother's three children (I never new my grandfather), and he symbolized for me more than any of the rest of our family "the greatest generation" because I always associated him with the military, from which he retired in the '60s or early '70s. I can't swear that I actually ever saw him in uniform, but I certainly saw pictures of him in one, and my early knowledge of his life always correlated with his military experience.

Outside of the tall frame and the usually booming voice (I always wondered if he looked like his dad, who died while Uncle was still in school, and I always assumed the loud voice was, like the older sister's, a function of his concern for his mother's deafness, although those who knew her better knew that she pretty much heard what she wanted to hear, regardless the volume), my memories of him are really quite sketchy.

I remember a trip to visit him in Colorado Springs (was that the year daddy drove all night and Margaret Joan and I marveled at the ice patterns on the windows?) when he woke us up one morning banging around in the kitchen making what he called a southwest omelette, which appeared to me to be eggs with vegetables like bell pepper and tomato and onions mixed in. I've never been at all sure his name for it made any real sense, but I remember liking it then and making something similary many times since.

I remember his little cocker spaniel who was so spoiled that she had a set of red rainboots to protect her feet in wet weather and a later wire-hair who just seemed to me to be way too energetic for her own good. I might should have watched that one more; I later adopted a part-terrier shelter dog who had a lot of that same energy.

When I was a freshman in college, he and his wife and my grandmother lived in a little house just a couple of blocks from our campus, and on most Wednesday afternoons I hiked over to their house to visit my grandmother and join the family in their standard tv dinners. I never understood why the menu was always tv dinners, but I liked the company and even tv dinners were a break from dorm food. If the fare was an attempt to discourage me from coming, it didn't work.

One of the stories I heard from Uncle during that time was his horror upon walking in on grandmother in her room, standing on her rocking chair to reach something on a too-high shelf (easy enough since she was less than 5 ft tall). If I was in college, grandmother must have been around 70, which I guess we all considered really old; now that I'm past 60, every time I climb on anything I chuckle about uncle's worry, especially since grandmother lived more than 100 years. I'd worry about my sister Susan Rene climbing on anything; Margaret Joan has only recently given up hanging theater lights, and she is now enjoying retirement in a woodshop where she has a lot more opportunity for danger than standing in a chair.


Uncle continued to drift in and out of my life over the years, most recently, I guess, a few years ago when he decided that the latest good think on the culinary scene was buffalo meat. For some reason, he seemed pretty sure that since I work at a school with a large agriculture program, I should have connections to a good source for buffalo. He didn't seem to connect the fact that I teach in the engineering college on a campus of nearly 50,000 students that includes a golf course, a railroad track, and an airport; my best hope for connecting with buffalo meat was the same internet he had used to email me about his plans to use it.

But his death this morning really does end our family's ties to "the greatest generation." Daddy was the first to go almost 40 years ago, followed by most of his family before we lost mother and grandmother almost 20 years ago and the rest of our parent's generation since then. Uncle was about 88 this morning, the longest-lived of any of them except his mom.

When daddy died (at only 56), we were all horrified to lose our dad, especially so young. When mother died after a tough fight with bone cancer, we were relieved to see her suffering end, but we realized oddly that, even as adults, we felt like orphans—and even more so a year or so later when our grandmother died and we had no one in our direct bloodline older than we. The other deaths in that generation weren't nearly as hard to take until this one: it's really the end of a generation in our family, really the end of an era.