My Uncle Barry: (1909-2001)
I’ve been avoiding writing this. I’ve got a few other pieces that need finishing and my energy needs to be targeted toward getting everything ready. Then something happened. And now it’s harder than I thought to do this.
On Wednesday afternoon, my uncle, Barry Jeffery, died at the age of 92. My youngest brother Daniel had been with him at the hospital in Florida. He called me that night from back in New Haven and I got the message when I came home from celebrating Suzan’s birthday. It was after midnight when I found out that my uncle said he wasn’t scared of dying, that he had no regrets about his life and that it meant a lot to him that we had talked on the phone the day before. Even though he couldn’t hear me through the oxygen mask, I had told him that I loved him and that I hoped to be something like the man he was someday. Daniel, who seems to be on top of every situation, could barely speak. I hung up the phone, then looked at myself in the mirror while I cried.
My Uncle Barry was an old man who recognized his time had come. In his letters and phone calls from the past few years, he talked about spending his days painting, writing, and shuttling back and forth to “various doctors, you know how it is.” Then he’d laugh.
Last week, his aeorta started collapsing on itself and his lungs filled with blood. He took excellent care of himself, still swam laps well into his 80s. But his body was imploding, one vital piece at a time. This probably has a scientific name, but to me, it just sounded like plain old aging.
Nonetheless, I can’t say that made me any more ready for it. He was in his early 70s when we became friends and he gave me a silver dollar for cleaning the leaves off the bottom of his pool. The net was twice the size of my eight-year old frame so he held the handle. He wrote letters to newspapers on current events throughout his retirement, winning several awards from the Florida Sun Sentinel and the Miami Herald. He painted western scenes and vignettes inspired by the cowboy movies he loved as a boy. He was very close to Daniel, who would come by at Christmas time and discuss politics and world events for hours. Daniel got Barry an AOL account and before long, my 90-year old uncle had a pen pal, a 25-year old graduate student in Japan.
Barry knew he was going to die someday, probably someday soon, but saw it as an afterthought. He had a lot to do before then.
Daniel and I talked several times this week in preparation for the eulogy he would give at Barry’s funeral. Our uncle was a dreamer saw himself as a cowboy, an English gentleman and always a hawk-eyed witness to history. But he spent most of his life in the textile business, paying bills, raising kids. He wasn’t a social guy but loved heated conversation. He knew his end was near but lived as though it would never come.
When you meet someone in the twilight of their life, you have all images and no backstory. You have their memories, once removed, after their kids are grown, after they’ve made most of their big decisions. If you’re lucky, you get to see them do what they’ve always wanted to, because they know there isn’t much time left. But you also have to be content with the mystery, the seeming contradictions. You weren’t there to see them grow.
According to our Aunt Teddy, Barry saw us as his adopted grandsons, a relationship Daniel took seriously and I probably didn’t. Barry would Instant Message me while I was working and I’d put him off. I’d send him pieces of my writing when he asked and I resented that he didn’t understand my sarcastic tone or my “Gen-X-isms.” I neglected to email him back because I felt like I’d spend most of the letter explaining who I was. I was in my early 20s and barely knew myself. I didn’t have to time to justify it to some old guy. Even when my Aunt Teddy told me he wasn’t well, that I should send him an email, I didn’t write him. He understood if I was busy. “You’re a businessman now,” she said. I didn’t think I would run out of time.
I felt some of that this week. My Uncle was gone and I was too busy to grieve, two major deadlines on Thursday, a trip away for the weekend, a relaunch in less than two weeks. Twice this week, I looked up and it was too late to call Teddy, to tell her how sad I was, that I was there for her if she needed me. Is this what working for myself, molding this dream from fresh clay, means? That sometimes being human has to wait until my schedule frees up? I didn’t go to Florida this Christmas because of work. I almost didn’t see them both last year but I made a stop, grudgingly, on the way back home, dragging my old friend Justin along. What is the matter with me?
I still didn’t know when I knelt in front of my window and prayed for the soul of my Uncle Barry, that he was somewhere with more time on his hands, where it didn’t hurt to breathe and where I would see him again someday.
Moving into my professional life, I will have to create, produce, manage and decide, faster and with more conviction than I’ve ever had. It scares me every time I think about it. But I’m going to continue on here and dedicate the next chapter of this story to my late Uncle Barry. He taught me that people can know you through your dreams and desires, and that sharing them without expectation or judgement means sharing your joy. That it’s not in competition with the rest of your life, but perhaps the most enriching part of it. And that we often have more time than we think.