Eulogy

Never care to know more than anyone is willing to share with me. Never even ask. You can’t force it.

My uncle Mike was both the most arcane man I’ve ever known and the most open. He managed to love and be loved deeply while leaving nearly everything to the imagination. He knew his life’s intrigue and he didn’t hide. He answered when you asked. He had a way of leaving you with a different question.

I didn’t get much time with him. While I didn’t know him so long, I don’t think anyone did. Not Dad not anyone. Like any good friend he could never leave for sure. He just disappeared at once and then slowly. He let us prepare to lose him.

He died around Labor Day I suppose. The air here was heavy and hot with decay. He died in India and they sent his body over to my grandparents choking down the last fumes of summer. That time of year the corn is cut and all the neighbors go home, empty empty expanse. The haze settles there where they bring in the dock, where you must wade into the lake now which cools before the new season. Where they plan another funeral for another child.

It was my first week of university. All the merriment downstairs tasted premonitory. Dad called on a Friday and we decided I wouldn’t come down for the service. It wasn’t far, right between school and home, but I had just gotten dropped off. None of that seems important now, but at the time no correct way presented itself. I wrote a poem to him in a book I never used again. Maybe I went out that night for some awful premeditated fun. I had made a good friend by then. I told her about what was going on. As much as you can three days into knowing someone and before you have the words. My uncle was buried, I got sick, and my parents and I tried not to send any news.

It was anticlimactic. He had lived an amazing life and then he receded from all that. It didn’t bother me that the proceedings were muted or that we were grieving in a disjointed way. I was mad I couldn’t find the words. The anger felt useless in my little room. I was mourning what I could not know. I’d never wanted to make him speak, but I thought he should have had the chance.

The frustration abated. I understood the confines of my control and it loosened. The sorrow had started long before. It happened as it happened, slow. I remembered an impassioned email I sent him when I was 10. I wanted to write a movie with him and he was far away. I had seen the Oscars and felt inspired. He had been there once and I missed him. It was a petition to return and stay delivered with a confidence I rarely trotted out. I was embarrassed by what I’d written. His reply was heartening but it could not shrink the distance. His visits became more infrequent, his behavior more erratic, and there was the illness. But I looked forward to them because of the laughter.

The people he left know how to grieve together. We’ve had a lot of practice. We do it best laughing and that’s how we sent him out into the lake in a lantern. He was there like we asked. It was the middle of another summer, where the days burn orange and the nights get cold. The corn isn’t ready and we push each other into the muddy field. I’m finding the words all the time.