The first experience with Death that I can remember was when my uncle Frank died.
He’d been sick for a long time with some kind of a kidney ailment. The state of the medical arts was not as good back then as it is today. Today, they might have put him on a list for a transplant, or maybe by now there are medicines that would help, I don’t know—I was about seven or eight, I think.
He’d gone from hospital to hospital, from doctor to doctor to specialist and specialist. Frank had a bit of money, but it didn’t help him. At some point, the medical people told his wife to take him home and make him as comfortable as she could and to… wait.
We’d gone to visit him a couple of times. The first time he was just sleeping. He looked like Uncle Frank, only a little sallow, and a little thinner than I’d remembered him. He looked tired.
The second time we went he scared me. He got out of bed and was hallucinating and yelling and cussing and wanted to pull at the various tubes and hoses. His wife and kids calmed him down and got him back into bed and made sure that everything was still connected. They scolded him for his outburst and he sounded a little contrite, but said “I’m sorry Dear Lord, but the Hellions won’t leave me alone!”
We left a couple of hours later.
About a week after that, maybe eight in the evening, the telephone rang and I somehow just instantly knew. Just automatically. The phone didn’t ring that much in our house—especially not that late at night. Dad answered, passed the phone over to my mother and I heard her start to choke back a few tears and ask after her sister, how she was holding up. Next thing I knew, we were packing bags and a few toys and getting ready for ninety-minute drive to what was now just Aunt Evelyn’s home. We spent the night in the living room.
Mom packed a sports coat for me, a shirt and tie and nice shoes and so on. But the next day she pulled me aside and asked me if I wanted to go and see Uncle Frank at the funeral home. “He’s in his pajamas, and he looks like he’s sleeping,” she told me. If I felt I was ready for this, they would take me in the morning but if I didn’t feel up to it, nobody would hold it against me. “A lot of people want to remember him as being alive, the last time they saw him,” she said. Well, I didn’t want to remember him standing there with his hospital gown open in the back, railing against the Hellions but given the choice, I didn’t think I wanted to go and see a dead body, either.
The funeral was the next day. Lots of singing, standing, kneeling, singing, standing, kneeling… it felt weird being in someone else’s church and the words to some of the prayers were different, which didn’t help. We all cried a little.
And then we went home.
