Good-bye, My Dear Uncle...

I lost my Uncle Benny today. The call came in from the states while I was at work. As he was driving to a construction job early yesterday morning, the police found him on the side of the road slumped over his steering wheel. It was a heart attack.

I hadn't spoken to him since Christmas. We'd all but lost touch when I started traveling: that's the sacrifice you make when you spend most of your life thousands of miles from home. I was very close with him during my formidable years. When my father was bogged down with work in South Jersey, Uncle Benny took on the task of raising me for a little while. He coached me through dating girls, taught me how to cope with moving away from my friends, and even helped me with my homework (though in certain subjects, such as Algebra, all he could offer was "X+Y=Benny gets an F). I spent most of seventh and eight grade with UB, as I called him then, listening to Guns and Roses and sneaking up to his room to watch South Park, pretending I understood all the adult jokes. Today, all I can think of is the unfulfilled promise I gave him when I left for Japan, "Let's have a beer together when I get back."

But he would never have blamed me for not making good on my suggestion. Uncle Benny was in every sense of the word an innocent bystander. All the forces that weighed him down, all the crap the world would throw at him - he never invited it. His lifestyle wasn't any better or worse than anyone elses and yet fate often treated him with a contempt that perhaps even the greatest of us could not have withstood. It always frustrated and angered my mother to see Uncle Benny suffer the way he did - losing his children and first wife, battling addiction, going through a divorce - but he would just brush it off with a joke or a simple "don't worry about it, Kath."

And so as though straight from the pen of Arthur Miller, Uncle Benny's quiet death on the side of the road reflected his nature in life. He wouldn't have dragged it out or dramatized it by slowly deteriorating over months or years. He wouldn't have subjected us to hours of hospital visits, though we would have gladly been there everyday by his side. We feel frustrated and bewildered that he was plucked from our lives so abruptly, but it was just his way: to live when he was alive and die without making a fuss.

That was how it always was between this man and those of us who loved him. We wanted to throw our fists in the air whenever bad things happened to him. We felt that fate had indiscriminately singled him out for a life of pain and unfairness, but he didn't see it that way. Uncle Benny knew that a good life was not just smiles and laughter, but a range of different experiences - sadness, relief, pain, hope, fear, elation - and that it is these experiences which make us human. He was a man who for much of his life crawled through the mud and suffered in silence. But that mud, which often dominates our reflections of his life, was merely a lifeless, gray mass in his eyes - a lack of form, against which shone the bright and colorful things that gave him joy; family, friends, music, laughter. By living this way, he brought us so much joy as well.

Thank you, Uncle Benny. Thank you for being real, for being hillarious, and for never disappointing us. May you continue to inspire even after your body has left us.