The Great Lost Cause

We are just stories in the end.

"Oh. I didn't want to tell you because you were so busy but Aunt Vicki passed away Friday."

A Sunday morning call with mom after a long week of staffing a promotional booth at the weeklong Wichita Riverfest and this news—coming after a few tales of the work I did all week and after deciding plans for the following Monday for our WWE Raw night out—was a bit of a shot in the jaw but a huge relief at the same time.

I feel heartache for my second cousin who had been tasked by her siblings and fate to be her caretaker in her waning years but I am not sad she's gone. Since coming back to Kansas, the few times I saw her she was barely hanging on. This woman, my great aunt, was no longer the vibrant, darkly funny, demanding person I remember from growing up. Diminished, crumpled, and frequently confused, I can't imagine the woman of thirty years ago being pleased with her future condition. Reliant on strangers to help her to the bathroom and drugs to keep her alive, I wonder what she would have said if she had been allowed a window into that existence before she arrived at it.

Since the comic divorce of last year, I keep seeing an odd fisheye lens on people around me. I still miss my third wife but who I miss stopped existing long before we split. As time reveals those unavoidable truths, I saw our marriage as a commitment while she saw it as an arrangement. I was deeply in love with her, she came to love me in her way. Who she was to me was not who she was. I mourn the loss of someone I'd lost years before I knew it and perhaps of someone I made up in my mind all along. I see a similarity to my Great Aunt Vicki. For me, Aunt Vicki was suspended in emotional amber from just before my Uncle Don died. After that, she remarried some guy I never bothered to get to know and rarely heard from her. The Aunt Vicki I knew was from a long time ago and the shriveled person in these past months wasn't her. Her minimized existence caused me more grief than her passing.

Over Memorial Day weekend, the same second cousin, my mom, and I went to Uncle Don's grave to lay flowers (and a tiny bottle of Jack Daniels) on his gravestone.

My memories of this man whom I was named after were likewise sealed in plastic from when I was a much younger person. In my experience, he rarely spoke. I see him in my mind as a figure sitting near the fireplace, smoking a pipe, and watching television in the downstairs of his home in the west side of Wichita. Also in my recollection, he only had exactly one heart to heart with me. He sat me down, he in his chair next to the fireplace, pipe in his mouth, and decided he needed to tell me about following dreams.

He had wanted to be a journalist but he was quite adept at engineering and needed a job to support his young family so he dropped the dream off and went into the thing that paid. Turned out he was really good at the engineering thing as he was one of the builders of the first space shuttle. Despite his successes in his second choice career, he regretted losing the dream and he wanted to caution me to make different choices for myself. I think he spoke for ninety minutes and it is that hour and a half that cemented who my great uncle was for me. He was different for others but to me he was this single moment in time.

Standing at his grave, my mom suddenly started telling stories about her version of him. Stories I had never heard. She told about how he and Aunt Vicki took mom in when she was suddenly pregnant with me and that Uncle Don somehow convinced my then very young dad to marry her. That they paid for the wedding and that I was not haphazardly named after him but that he requested it. It was like she was chipping away at granite revealing parts of a statue I had never seen. I can't say how it made me feel necessarily but it was a good feeling nonetheless. This person who loomed large in my childhood became more real in the telling, less a figure of respect and more a decent man doing what he thought was right in a world he chose in the place of his passion.

Unlike Aunt Vicki, he died of a heart attack on a tennis court as I recall. Fast. Immediate. Clean. Doing something he had come to love. Aunt Vicki clung to the slivers of electromagnetic energy that kept her body functioning but I seriously doubt she was content with her last year or so.

I will remember and mourn the loss of the Aunt Vicki I knew. I will recall her vivacious long raven black hair across her back as she cooked for the horde of children and family members. Her reprimanding my cousin Greg for starting fights with me that I had started. Her love for her flawed boys so strong that even their sometimes horrifying behavior was excused in her view. This version is mine. This Aunt Vicki is all for me and I refuse to connect that memory to her slowly dying existence in the present tense.

I've frequently made the statement that if I see it coming, the inevitably of my demise in medical terms, I will drive to the desert, lie down in a hole, and just let myself go. It sounds frivolous to say but I mean it. That's a lot of work so I'd rather go like Uncle Don except not playing tennis. Something I love to do. Fast. Immediate. Clean. The men in my family tree tend to go that way so the odds are in favor of my quick exit.

Dylan Thomas admonished us to "not go gentle into that good night." He tells us that "Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light." Granted he died before he was forty so how the fuck would he know? I like the idea so I hold onto it. The dying of that light is the one thing we all share. I won't go gently. It's not in my nature.

So, farewell to Aunt Vicki. She was fully human and I'm filled with joy that she was here for a brief time. I hope my mom has some unheard stories about her as well.