(Note: This was written a few nights ago. I didn’t hit publish because I was thinking, be funny. Why? Don’t they always say the best comedy is born out of pain? Anyway, what am I supposed to be hiding now? The only reason I’m here is because I’m a complete failure at branding myself as anything but boringly generic and whatever I think other people expect me to be. So, here it is. Most names have been changed.)
Uncle Frank was the exact opposite of Granny and relished it from the day they met, according to family stories. He was fastidious, yet had a deep, belly laugh and loved to drive wherever fancy led him. The yard he created was carefully laid out in rows, the lawn was always mown, the bushes carefully trimmed, and it smelled like suburban perfection.
Our favorite part was Mr. Turtle, hiding in the front hedges.
His least favorite part was when we’d careen down the hill into the hedges surrounding Mr. Turtle.
I never saw Uncle Frank in anything but a white shirt and slacks, until he had a stroke.
That was when my childhood ended, and I realized that people live on in your memory of their voices and their laughter long after they fall silent. That visit is when I realized there’s a vast lonely space inside us where love and loss lives and, even when we’re living the loss of the same person, the pain is intensely personal. Lonely.
We came back to visit after Uncle Frank had a massive stroke. When my Dad, Mom, brother, sister, and I walked into the room, he saw my Dad first…”Buddy.” He looked at my Mom and my siblings blankly, then turned his eyes to me…”Amy Kate.”
He remembers me. He smiled.
He saw me, and he remembered me.
That night, I sat in the living room of the house he shared with Aunt Ginny and Uncle Ralph, and I listened while my parents talked to Aunt Ginny, about how desperate things were or seemed or could get. It’s hard to know the difference when you’re only nineteen.
When we got back to my uncle’s house on the other side of town, I finally cried because everything was changing, but I didn’t realize how much it was changing at the time; I was only halfway through college, and the worst was yet to start.
Today, though, I remember how Uncle Frank would tell stories on Christmas night after dinner, laughing. He loved fresh bread and doughnuts from the bakery, real bakeries, Pittsburgh bakeries. He passed down all the family history he had to me in the handwriting I would try to copy, but never could take the exotic slant out of thanks to the wildness I assume comes from the other side of the family. (He’d definitely agree.)
My Seedy Affair 