"Death smiles at us all."

2023.08.15 @ 08:48 MDT / 10:48 EDT

On Saturday, July 29, 2023 I journaled about death.

Not knowing that on Wednesday, August 9, 2023, a mere week and a half later, my uncle would be taken from his impermanent earthly home. Taken from us.

I think about death often. This is why I feel the need to say a lot. Too much. Word vomit. And the strange phenomenon about it all is that I either end up saying way too much or not enough paralyzed by the shock, each time not really getting across what I actually want to get across. To you. This is why I often turn to music.

I am slow to process and sometimes things that happen now will take me minutes hours days weeks months years even decades fully to comprehend the impact of. For it to settle. Now I am ready to discuss. But you have already moved on. Maybe even in the literal sense. Passed from this temporal physical realm into whatever is next.

My family is living history. Well. They were. Are. Some of them. Still. Preserved in a web of love and loss and drama and trauma and secrets and gossip and laughter amidst the unbearable, inexcusable, unnecessary, unavoidable tragedy of it all. "Comedy equals tragedy plus time." I have always had a dark sense of humor.

Laughing on the phone or in the car in between the hours of tears shed with my cousin and my mother and my brother and my aunts and my friend during this time of loss is the only thing I know how to do. To get me through.

I am forever grateful for the people in my life who show up. Who have showed up. The sad truth is -- what we do matters little and matters greatly. The truth is always both.

It matters little in the grand scheme of things. You are incredibly insignificant in this world and will likely be forgotten after you die. Take a walk by the ocean on a clear winter's night and gaze at and just try to count the stars if you think otherwise.

And yet.

What you do, who YOU ARE -- this matters. To the people you love. To the ones you come into contact with daily. To nature, to animals. To your pets. To that stranger on the plane or train or bus you decided to have a random conversation with. To that homeless person you acknowledged and with whom you had a good chin wag. How can I help? you asked. Did you follow through?

As a kid, I did not understand why my friends were all scared of the dentist. (This was before my first cavity, mind you). My uncle was my dentist! A trip to the dentist meant seeing my uncle! He would give the biggest bear hugs and always smelled like the most unique, fresh cologne and... peppermint. He was probably the best smelling man I knew. Up until the last time saw him last summer, that scent did not change.

A man so generous. When I could not afford insurance as a 20-something fresh out of grad school working multiple jobs to get by, he would still do my teeth for free. Working well beyond the age he could have retired. He practiced dentistry for 50 years.

He gave my family (and others) tickets to see Boston Red Sox games at Fenway Park which we thoroughly enjoyed over the years.

And that house. I do not think any of us in my family can forget that beautiful house and the lovely Thanksgiving dinners that he and my aunt used to host. The dining room. The TV room. The talent shows with my cousins! Family football and games in the backyard. The mouthwatering antipasto. Thanksgiving dinners were an essential part of my childhood, so ingrained in my memory and in my being. They are who I am, as is that house. Two years ago when I visited my parents, I drove by that house again just to see it once more. When I lived in Massachusetts, I would drive by every so often.

My parents lived so close, we used to go there for the second half of Halloween -- my uncle always gave out the LARGEST chocolate candy bars to trick-or-treaters! Which I found ironic considering he was a dentist...

I shared many memories with him over the years, and it is crazy to me now to look back and think of him and so many others in my family and realize how very little I know. I long to know the stories that I do not know. I crave this.

Will I ever know? Do I need to know? Will they be revealed in time in various ways?

Time, like much in life, is not linear; if you are foolish enough to believe it is, you've got a thing coming.

The energy we put out has a way of coming back to us, if not in the way that we would expect it.

Uncle Billy & me, Christmas Eve 2017

my uncle's writing

My uncle likely impacted countless lives (and countless teeth) by being a dentist. Some of those people will show up at the wake and funeral today and tomorrow to pay their respects to my family.

To me, he was my uncle. He did not need to be or do anything. He mattered just by existing.