My uncle Willy died last Friday. He was 78. While alive, he was the wiry, hairy-chested type of old man of which the world does not make any more these days. He’s the first of my dad’s siblings to die and I believe that it has affected my dad in ways that even his mother’s death over ten years ago has not. When I got the message I was sitting in a park listening to indie rock music in Chicago. I couldn’t help from imagining how strange Willy would have thought the whole scene to be, and in imagining that I thought of how far I have come from my family: that thing I grew up with, and as, that I spent much of my adolescence trying to outdistance, and have spent much of late 20s and 30s trying to figure out how to get back to.
What I knew of Willy is that he farmed a bit: sweet potatoes and the like. He worked for several years at the Nu-Tread tire company, just behind the outfield wall of the old Durham Athletic Park; the same park where the Durham Bulls play and where the movie Bull Durham was shot. He also bought cords of wood in the fall the at he would cut, split, and deliver to houses nearby for winter heat. On the property that he owned there are two ponds that my brother and I frequented on weekends for fishing. Bass and bream could be caught in such aplenty, with bobbers and worms or crickets or grasshoppers, that one would think that Willy stocked the pond, but that was just not him. It’s almost as if the fish were there because a man like Willy could only have a pond with such plentiful fish.
In the fall, my brother and I (and sometimes father and mother) would help harvest the sweet potatoes. It seems that I even remember gathering bailed hay at some point as well. When a tire went flat on one of the cars we would go to the used tire and repair shop that Willy and a friend had established in a building on his property.
He had a wife named Nelly and a daughter named Patricia, my cousin, who lived across the street with her husband. I would not know Patricia if she were to walk right up to me. Probably wouldn’t recognize Nelly anymore, maybe not even Willy in his last few years.
As far as I knew this was all there was of Willy, these external things, but that, of course, just cannot be so. In dealing with his death I have felt mostly for my father, and only because my mother told me he was having a tough go for a few days. Willy, like my father, was one of those movie-masculine role models for me when I was growing up – all steely and rugged and stoic, yet approachable. Willy, it seemed, was a little quieter than my dad. Had I lived all of my growing-up years with Willy I don’t know that I would know him any better than I do now.
How did he fall in love with Nelly, if indeed he did? Was there someone else? Did he ever say “I love you” and “I want to marry you”, later to have to say “I loved you” and “I wanted to marry you”? Why the tire company? Why sweet potatoes? What was your favorite book of the Bible? Favorite book? Was Patricia the apple of your eye when she was young? Did my father annoy you when he was a baby? Were you around then? Did you have a best friend, early or late? Names? Tell me a story.
So many questions that come after a death. Questions that may not have been answered had they been asked anyway. I never made much of an effort, but this past week I have wished that I did.
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