Belligerent Rejectamenta

The French have a saying for it (naturally): l’esprit d’escalier. Literally translated, it means “the spirit of the staircase,” but more to the point, it refers to that feeling we’ve all had of thinking of the right, the witty, the perfect thing to say on your way downstairs to leave, rather than at the moment when said thing to say would have been appropriate, or charming, or moving. It’s the feeling of having your wits show up late to the party, when you’re already headed to the street to hail a cab. I’ve regularly partaken of this particular esprit for most of my life…I think fast enough on my feet, I feel, but there are times when the right thing just fails to hit me until I’m driving home later.

So it was when I gathered with my family on Tuesday to bury my uncle. In a funeral service bereft of professional clergy or well-prepared eulogists (a lead I fully intend to follow myself some day), his younger brother read a psalm, and the family commiserated and offered up their memories and their thoughts on my uncle, the oldest of three children and father of three of his own. As I listened to my parents and my cousins offer up their heartfelt and tearful eulogies, my mind struggled with the idea of saying anything at all. What could I possibly say that would make anything better, ease any grief? And so I sat in silence, feeling like a heel for not having anything to offer, and my heart went out to my family as they struggled through one of the hardest things we’ve done since we buried my grandfather nigh on 15 years ago.

Part of the problem is simply that I’ve always looked and sounded better in writing than I do in person. The aforementioned cousins are quick-witted, funny folk and have long been the ones with the ready joke or the throwaway smartass comment that set me rolling. Me, I just remembered all of it. I don’t say things…I write things down. Maybe it’s the emotional distance provided by the pen and page (or photon and pixel)…I’ve never really spent enough time reflecting on it to figure that out. It may just be as simple as my need to have access to a Backspace key, so that the words that aren’t just so can be banished, removed, taken back.

It wasn’t until I was driving home from a friend’s house the next evening that things began to come to me. L’esprit d’drive home, I guess. Memories of my childhood visits to Montgomery came crashing in like a wave, and in all of those memories, my uncle loomed larger than life. I think there’s a part of him that simply refused to grow up, and it made summer trips to his house a heck of a lot of fun. Especially if the 4th of July was involved. When my uncle went to procure the precious explosives, he didn’t come back with some paltry pack of crackers or sleeve of bottle rockets in hopes of keeping us distracted for an hour or two. He came back with trunkloads of the stuff. Huge bulging paper grocery sacks full of black powder magic. He loved the fire and the sparks and the colors just as much as we did, and had a soft spot for the earth-shaking kabooms. He always let us kids have most of the fun, but he liked to keep a bag of the serious bang-bang, the M-80s, for himself. After one or two such holiday trips, 4th of July in Montgomery became mandatory, as far as my brother and I were concerned, because that meant huge bags of firecrackers, and the obligatory bottle rocket fights with neighborhood kids. I think my uncle enjoyed watching us light the things off as much as he enjoyed any of the short-lived pyrotechnics, honestly.

The other memory that came most immediately to mind is a little less distinct in my head, perhaps because it relates to only one specific instance instead of something more habitual like the fireworks. For reasons that I can’t conjure back from the lost recesses of my brain, I recall a summer trip to Montgomery in which my mother and my aunt left the kids with my uncle and went elsewhere. I don’t know what the nature of the trip was, or even for certain how long they were gone, but I think it was at least a weekend. All I clearly remember is that my uncle (and maybe my Dad? I don’t recall) was left in charge of a quartet of boys ranging in age from probably around 7 to 13. This, as one might imagine, would have been the doom of lesser men. We ordered pizzas and watched movies and swam in the pool endlessly. After some sort of badgering session instigated by I know not who (though I suspect the oldest cousin of starting up the chorus of agreement from the rest of us), it was decided that the excellent pool in the backyard was missing one key feature: a high-dive.

From here, I can almost feel the blood draining from the faces of any and all mothers in the audience. The last thing four boys of that age need, I’m sure they would all agree, is access to a high-dive platform. But my uncle apparently thought it was a splendid idea. Lumber was procured, and some hastily sketched plans and a few hours of pounding nails later, there was a makeshift platform in the backyard. Upon reflection, it was probably a bit of a rickety thing (as evidenced by its total dismantling and destruction shortly after my aunt and mother returned), but for the better part of at least one sunny afternoon, we hurled ourselves off a six-foot platform into the pool, and that backyard became the coolest place imaginable to us. Or at least, that’s how my tricky memory recalls it. Even as I write this, the memory becomes less distinct. As I grasp at the particular details, they fade and make me second-guess if this even went down at all. I’m pretty sure it did, but not as sure as I was at the start of this paragraph. Part of that certainty is simply my uncle’s involvement. This was the kind of thing he would have done, pure and simple. If my cousins tell me later that they don’t remember this at all, I’ll chalk it up to a pre-adolescent dream that lingered too long in my head, but it won’t change the fact that my uncle would have done it, because he was a big kid at heart who loved making people happy, his family especially.

In an instant and a screech of tires, the possibility of another generation benefiting from his generosity and joyfulness was taken from my family. I’m not going to drop platitudes about it being his time…it wasn’t, and wouldn’t have been for a while yet. I appreciate what people mean when they say things like that at funerals, and in most cases they’re right. People passing peacefully in their sleep in their mid-80s were ready to embark on their life’s last great adventure. Accidents don’t allow for the same sort of comforting. This wasn’t supposed to happen. It was random happenstance, in the form of a dumb kid running a light, and it could have happened to anybody at all. But it happened to my uncle, his wife, and his grandson. My aunt is still recovering from her injuries, and the grandson is going to walk with a bit of a limp for a while, but they’ll be OK. Except that they’ve lost a great man. We’ve all lost a great man.

That’s perhaps what made it most difficult to sit there at his grave and feel my voice freeze in my throat, my brain lock down and refuse to string together the most basic of sentences in praise of a man that did the world a great deal more good than it ever did him, and yet he never seemed bitter about it. He was every inch his father’s son, and that’s about as high praise as I can conjure. I think most people suffer in comparison to my grandfather in many ways, but his kids all hold up well to that scrutiny. As someone said at the graveside service, his legacy is evident in the faces and actions of his children, and I’m proud to call all of them cousin. I only wish I saw more of them, but there’s precious little that adulthood and its attendant hassles and obligations will allow on that front. He doted on his grandson by all accounts, and I have no reason to doubt them. I just didn’t have the privilege of seeing him very much in the past few years as he brought happiness to yet another child.

These are just a few of the things I wish I could have said, could have remembered, on Tuesday afternoon. They don’t come close to doing the man any justice whatsoever…my skill with the written word falls a good bit short of that task, I fear. But this space at least provides me with a way to say the things I wish I’d said. At the very least, I hope that, should family read it (and I hope some of them do), it will be taken for the tribute I intend. Firecrackers and reckless pool construction hardly seems sufficient, honestly, but those two things crystalize, in my mind, the very essence of what my uncle was all about. To be sure, he had his more serious side - his faith, his work, that sort of thing. But those are the things that happened “off stage” from the perspective of a kid who just wanted to play in the pool, and were never things I saw in action…I leave it to those that knew him in those contexts to speak to that side of him. I knew him as the fun guy, the slightly (or maybe not so slightly) impulsive uncle that bought firecrackers and had a smile and a laugh that could fill a room.

Goodbye uncle. You’ll be missed.