Yesterday, I went to my Uncle Mike's funeral. I didn't take any pictures, mainly because I hadn't seen anyone on my mom's side of the family since I was in grade school and felt super awkward asking grieving practical strangers to pose for a shot with me. The one relative I actually had seen on occasion as an adult, oddly enough, was Uncle Mike. He had just moved to my corner of the state a few months ago, and I was eagerly looking forward to reconnecting with him. Last month, I was at a wrestling meet in his town and briefly thought about seeing if he was available to visit over a cup of coffee, but I was already in the middle of a super long day and just didn't have the energy for a visit. Boy, do I wish now that I'd made the time anyway.
Another missed connection that has always haunted me is that of my great-aunt Marietta. Unlike Uncle Mike, I got to see Aunt Marietta a lot through high school and college, as she lived in my hometown and frequented my parents' restaurant often. Once, early in our marriage, Adam and I paid her a visit at her house, and what ensued was a wonderful hour or two of her pulling out all sorts of ancient family memorabilia and expounding on the family history all the way back to the early 1800's. WHOA! I thought. Here is someone who knows all our family details! Whoever knew? I determined to return next time with a recording device to preserve all this info for posterity. Well, as you may have guessed, that recording session never happened. Aunt Marietta, and a huge swath of the family history, died a couple years later.
The third story is happier. In 2018, when Adam was in training over in Seattle, I went over with the kids to visit him. My great-uncle Al, the last survivor of my grandfather's siblings, lived in the area. I don't know if I'd ever really met him before, but he and my dad enjoyed visiting together whenever they could, and I thought maybe he'd like to see me, too. I arranged to meet him at a McDonald's. It was a challenging meetup, as I was wrangling three small children fresh off a six-hour car ride, but he was gracious and had lots of funny stories about growing up with my granddad. We laughed a lot, ate some cheeseburgers, and went our separate ways. A year or two later, he passed away, leaving behind at least one great-niece with no regrets.
I didn't know where I was going with this when I sat down to type, but I guess the moral of the story is to make time for the people you care about, especially the older ones. Uncle Mike's funeral was unlike any I've been to before, full of people who hadn't seen each other in decades saying, "Let's not wait until the next funeral to get together!" He was the first relative in my parents' generation to die, and one could just see all the siblings working through the horrible realization that everyone's getting older and life is unpredictable. Uncle Mike was 61, and I took for granted that he would be around for a while. Aunt Marietta was in her nineties, so I REEEEEEALLY should have known better than to put that meeting off. The future is not guaranteed, the past is gone; we only ever really have the present moment.
Wait But Why has a thought-provoking blog post that I think about all the time; it visually lays out all the weeks you can reasonably expect in your life and what percentage of time you have left for things, such as how many days you will spend with your parents. Pretty sobering stuff.
Well, I certainly have restarted the blog with a bunch of heavy subjects! Maybe now that I'm getting the big stuff out of the way, the more trivial will follow soon.
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