Time for change can be metaphoric: it can also be for real. Right now, things are very mortal, dark and dull. Death stalks the laneway. Uncle Bill, 84, is expected to return home tomorrow after two weeks at Charlton Hospital in Fall River. Not to live, but to die at peace in his own bed instead of in a hospice, the same bed where his wife and mother-in-law each passed away, not very many years ago.
Poor Uncle Bill. I wonder if he will have enough presence of mind left to just look out the window across the fields to the sea? Or whether this gesture is more for the daughters' benefit than his own? Will he be conscious? Will he know what is happening or even care where he is? Uncle Bill. Uncle Wiggily. Uncle "Nud" I have loved him like a father, sometimes more. He has known me forever, from the beginning of my time. Who else is left? Everyone says, “it's time, it is all for the best,” wondering what he lives for. What presumption! He lives to live, of course, for life itself, just as he did in a Japanese concentration camp in WWII. He lives for his daughters, his granddaughters and for sitting in the warm sun, shirtless. His books of crossword puzzles and acrostics. For picking grass growing in the gravel of his drive, for picking raspberries by the Hodgson House Camp in the summer and the fall, for the trips to the market, to the Post Office and the dump. He did all this until the last weeks of his life, until days before. I saw him in the Post Office. I passed him driving to the dump. I loved going up the lane for the quick loan of a tool, a screwdriver or a nail, or for his cookies, cans of beer, of soda, and for the shared experience of the same boarding school, of Harvard, or Princeton. And for innumerable Thanksgivings up in the Sherer Hollywoods, of tennis at the Sakonnet G&T Club and at “Namquit Farm.” I still see in my mind’s eye walking across the Battlefield with Aunt Bobby, a basket with a bottle of gin and tonic water, probably some lemons. I see him now, faded red cotton shorts, boat shoes, a bleached out madras shirt, his little notebook in its pocket. We shared some pedigree and lots of time. We shared the laneway. Bill was always funny with Sally, with Sophie, and with the dogs. It was just so incredibly hard to communicate with these last years, no voice, no patience to write things down. I could understand him best when we were alone and I could concentrate on every word he attempted to say. It became increasingly difficult to understand him; I don’t know why. I don’t know why he chose not to use that electronic device which worked so well, once you got used to it. He was always having to clear his throat. Alone with his cable television, asking if I wanted to come and watch something, even if he were asleep in his room. Uncle Bill almost always turned in about six or seven p.m. at the latest. Uncle Bill! He wasn’t even a real uncle; he was my first cousin-in-law.
There is more going down on the laneway; this in not all by any means. This in not all by any means. There's Kathleen, across the lane a non-smoker with cancer of the lung, and Mrs. Reynolds, who just sold her field for almost a million dollars less than she was asking for, with terminal breast cancer. And of course, there's my own mother, dead in 1994 of colon cancer, and Uncle Charlie who had colon cancer as well. Uncle Bill will join the dead, his beloved Aunt Bobby in Swan Point, right here in Providence along the Seekonk River. Time. We come and go. What lingers of the good and bad in us? Who determines our contribution or our mark? Who gives us our final grade? Who says we enter the Kingdom, or go to Hell? Bill did not buy into religion. He was an atheist. He did not, despite an intense indoctrination into the Episcopalian faith, adopt it as his own. He did not turn to God when he was imprisioned by the Japanese. This is our mortality, Bill would say. We are the culmination of our possessions and our children and our work. If we are artists and create something that outlives us, we are very rare. Most careers do not do not create much more than weatlth. Not a life commuting to and from Boston and an insurance corporation. He had some fun with it, I think. It is hard to see his soul invested there. Life's effort translates into land or things, or else just memories. Good gestures. Good words, kindnesses, and generosities. And then, with or without much commotion, we are gone, the final show sometimes mistaken for our worth. What then of those who make the error of outliving all our peers? What determines "greatness?" Is it left to the whim of whomsever can say or tell a story best? Or simply through silence? Do not look to me to know: I find things out usually by knowing what they are not, more than by what they are. Time for Change. A changing of the guard. There are only a few old soldiers left. There's Joe, and Dad. The rest are history, another generation forms the next, front line in the war of humanity against death. In this regard, we may as well just march over a tall cliff, at least until science discovers a way we will never have to die. And then, who knows? That could be a fate worse than life?
