Remembering Uncle Deacon

It's taken a while to bring myself to write this one. There have been too many deaths in the family over the last few years, and too many people who were important parts of my childhood disappearing from my life.

I guess I just didn't want to acknowledge yet another one. As if I could "just say no" and all the dying would stop.

Uncle Deacon, a variation on Uncle Dee, a.k.a. Uncle D, which was short for Uncle S.D., which stood for ... well, I won't tell, because I know how much he disliked his real given first and middle names. Most people knew him as S.D., and that seemed to work just fine, so it will work fine here.

S.D. and Vivian, another uncle and aunt on my mom's side, another of the strong links in the chain that was my family, another couple that stayed together 'til death did they part -- and shaped my own ideas and ideals of what marriage could and should be.

As far as I know, Uncle Deacon had only one vice: cigarettes. And they got him, as they got so many others of his generation, who started smoking at a young age back when there were no warnings imprinted on the cartons and no scary pictures of black lungs displayed in elementary school science classes. The cigarettes got him - but only after a long, hard fight.

Uncle Dee was a carpenter, like another the father of another Very Good Man who went down in history. My uncle may not have achieved world-wide fame, but he could work a special kind of magic with a hammer or a saw.  Like my other uncles and my dad, he worked hard and never got paid what he was worth for it. But this was in another time, when a job well done was its own reward, and pride in craftsmanship still meant something.

But the cigarettes slowly wore him down. In the last years of his life, he was no longer able to work. Chained to a rolling bottle of oxygen, he wasn't able to get out much - but he still made the trip back to the city to visit family, and we still went to the country to visit him ... although not as often as we should have. The kids loved to go to Uncle Dee's, where there were horses and cows and the few acres that his hard work had paid for (and which seemed to stretch on forever to children raised in the suburbs).

But life gets busy, and the kids get older, and the visits become less frequent. And we lose something precious, not realizing that it's slipping away until it's almost gone.

We almost didn't make that last visit, my son and I.  A writer by trade, I had deadlines to meet. A high school student, he had homework to do.  We were both afflicted by the peculiar laziness that comes from living at warp speed, always on the go, always doing. We almost put it off for another time.

But in the end, we didn't. And I count that as one of the best decisions of my life.

A few years earlier, my daddy had been snatched away in the middle of the night, while I was 300 miles away. A few years after that, my Aunt Pearl was there, and then she was gone, with the plans we'd been making to get together with her and the rest of the family only a few weeks away - and then suddenly, cancelled forever.

The cigarettes got my Uncle Deacon. But there's this: they took him slowly. And this time, we got to see him one more time, and we got to say goodbye.

This past Christmas, the family got together again. It was good - it was great - but it wasn't the same. There were too many important people missing. Too many singles who had been part of a couple for forty years or more. Aunts without Uncles. Uncles without Aunts. Mom without Dad. And those of us who are left, with so many memories. And the hope that somewhere, in some Better Place, there was another family Christmas gathering going on. Where the cigarettes never get anybody. And nobody ever has to leave without saying goodbye.

- DLS/2001