After a busy day, I checked my messages. I had a text from my mother. My uncle had died.
He was the last of my father's brothers, the one we hadn't had anything to do with for years and years. The estrangement began when my grandmother passed away. His wife and her child put on quite the show. After that, years passed. The last time we saw each other was about fifteen years ago when he was doing coast-to-coast trips driving an eighteen wheeler and stopped in Bloomington to see me. I remember that visit being a good one, and I had hope that maybe my family would pull itself together. Then my grandfather died, and insanity on a level not even Hollywood could imagine occurred.
My feelings are in conflict. On one hand, a member of my family is gone. I feel that I should feel something profound. On the other, so much ugliness and sheer crazy resulted from almost every encounter with his wife and stepchildren that absence was not just the best policy, it was the only rational one. I didn't have the overwhelming sorrow I had when Dad's other brother, the middle son, passed away. Instead, this strange confusion came in.
I always thought there would come a time somehow when the two brothers would pull together again. I don't know exactly how I imagined it happening or why I thought it would after so long a time of separation. Deep down, I guess I believed that one day something would heal the rift. Isn't that the way families are supposed to work?
Maybe some wounds don't heal. Maybe sometimes, no matter what the beginning connection, actions sever the ties clean. Cause and effect. Karma. Something....
Or maybe the chance is always there until the time runs out. I wonder, although I am not going to ask the question, if my father ever thought they would reconcile. Was it ever in the back of his mind? Was it in the back of my uncle's?
His family continues their ridiculous behavior even after his death. They deliberately left out his two brothers in the obituary. They listed everyone else down to the family pets and the military branch in which he served, but they refused to acknowledge that he had not one but two brothers. As my students would say, "Just petty."
And maybe that's fine. It is now in every way too late for mending fences, after all.
