on death and mourning

I had an uncle who died a few years ago. He was the brother of my mother, and at forty-five years of age, he died too young. In life’s way of being totally unfair, it was decreed that this uncle of mine would not live to see his three daughters graduate from college, would not be there to terrorize their first suitors, would not be there to walk them down the aisle, would not be there to carry his grandchildren.

When I found out about his death from my sister, I experienced a certain deep sadness, a quiet sorrow that was not entirely due to his death, but also due to the fact that I could not properly mourn him because I was never really that close to him.

And so I ask, what is mourning?

Is it crying because we wanted the person to live longer? To want him to live longer would have been a to want to cause him pain, for to his last breath he was suffering from an illness that probably felt like slow drowning to him. Is it sorrow because forty-five years was not enough?

When you love someone, even a hundred years would never be enough.

Also, I ask, who mourns him?

His brothers and sisters, all now made painfully aware of their mortality, for here was one of them, taken from them? His mother, who has outlived her husband, and now is proof-positive that surely, it should be against the laws of humans and kind gods for a parent to have to bury a child, her youngest son? His young wife, and their two children barely of school age, who in the 6 years or so they had with him have now been cheated of having thirty years more? His eldest daughter, the apple of his eye for so many years, who had been bending heaven and earth to come home from the States to take care of her father only to see him next lying in his last bed on earth? His nieces and nephews, his cousins, his neighbors and friends, the various people he must have come into contact with in his short and pained life?

For different people, there are different answers. In the way that we all are part of all the people in our lives, we are part of them in different ways. So when we lose someone forever in the way that death makes us lose someone, we do not perceive our loss of him in the same way that other people will.

After all, in the grand scheme of things, his death was just one of many that rainy-sunny Friday, July 23^rd. His death is nothing to the many other people of the world, for whom a death like his, peaceful in coming, known to but a few, is unremarkable at a time when death is violent and lurid and a selling point for tabloids.

The reality, however, is that life is never really taken in the grand scheme of things. Because it is in the little things that life is lived. And it is in the little things of his life that we find the answers to what we mourn about my uncle’s death, and why we mourn him.

He was a loving father, his pride and joy in his eldest daughter so evident in every word he spoke of her, his gentle amusement in his younger daughters seen in his quiet way of smiling. He was a son who affectionately called his mother Mommy, like forty-five years had not passed between his first word and his last breath.

His was a simple life, taking joy in family dinners and gift giving during Christmas and birthdays, phone calls from absent friends and relatives.

He was a son, a brother, a husband, a father, an uncle, a cousin, a friend, and that is how he will be missed.

He was a person who was all that, and so much more to us, and so forty-five years is not enough, could not possibly, ever be, nearly enough, yet in many ways more than we could ever have hoped for.