A Kind Man

My uncle died last March. A host of medical conditions conspired to do him in at 93. His death certificate listed heart failure as the immediate cause of death. But macular degeneration, edema, and melanoma, among other ailments plagued him in the years leading up to it. Despite being hampered by the shackles of old age, my uncle always had a kind word, a smile, a gentleness that belied his suffering.  And his mind remained sharp till the end.

His final decline began with a fall in late January. Bruised and bleeding, we insisted that he go to the hospital. His wounds healed, but he failed to regain enough strength to walk on his own. When he stopped making progress, his medical insurance insisted that he be discharged. He wanted to go home, but he lived alone, miles from his nearest relative. I convinced him to go to a personal care home where he could continue receiving physical therapy. I told him it would be temporary – that he shouldn’t give up hope that he would get back home.

Regardless of what I told him, I worried, lying awake night after night trying to figure out how he could possibly go home in his disabled condition. My wife, God bless her, did not waste time worrying. She took action to get his house ready for his return. He would be using a walker or wheelchair, so she replaced his worn shag carpeting and curling linoleum with new, low pile carpeting and laminate flooring. She looked into 24-hour in-home assistance services. She did everything possible to facilitate his return home.  He never made it.

In the next few weeks, my uncle bounced between the personal care home, the hospital and back again. My wife was with him at the personal care home when he passed away in the early hours of March 4.  The nurse had sent me home earlier with the assurance that, “It won’t be tonight.”

Nearly nine months after my uncle’s death, I still feel the loss. I often think I should give him a call. It’s been too long since I last talked to him. Then I realize he’s no longer here.

He may best be described as an extraordinary ordinary man. Living through the Great Depression taught him thriftiness, but also generosity. Every time I took him to a doctor’s appointment, he insisted on buying me lunch.

In World War II, he was aboard the troop ship S.S. Leopoldville when it was torpedoed by a German U-Boat on Christmas Eve 1944. He spent hours in the frigid waters of the English Channel before being rescued and then hospitalized for exposure. 

He had a high school education, worked in one of Pittsburgh’s steel mills and married the girl next door.  Years later, when his wife was confined with Alzheimer’s disease, my uncle didn’t let a day go by without visiting her.

After my father died, I looked to my uncle as a surrogate, visiting and telephoning him as often as I could, and inviting him to dinner during the holidays. During those dinners, my children would tell him about whatever was going on in their lives. “Is that right,” he would say, more as an acknowledgment than a question. I never saw him lose his temper, treat someone badly, or disparage anyone.

I once asked him how he would like to be remembered. “As a kind man,” he replied.  That is how I will remember him.