What Good Looks Like

I was only saying, 'hello' as the urgent voice on the phone this morning beckoned my quiet. I've known this man my entire life.  Didn't much like him as a child.  He was too stern, too emotionally unavailable, too critical.  He gave me nice birthday and Christmas presents.  He was a good boy.

Within a minute she spewed out that he was dying.  In hospice officially.  He had been receiving hospice-like care on and off for a year.  It is an insurance designation or...it was.  It is terminal now.  Shallow breathing.  He would have been 94.

Just the other night I dreamed about him.  He had left me something in an envelope.  A letter maybe.  Something that was his Mom's.  He dearly loved his Mom, my Nana.  It doesn't matter what was in the envelope.  His life mattered.  It was a life of service to others.

First the military during the second world war.  He was a paratrooper and made many jumps over the South Pacific.  Hospitalized on his last jump for three months in an Australian hospital, he grew to love this country.  He went back several times.  I was always getting postcards with horses on them from him.  He had no children save a few nieces and nephews.  He never married.

Educated at Duke University, it took him eight years to finish.  He'd work a year and save for the next year's tuition.  One determined man.  He was determined to take care of his family.  Never minding to help anyone financially.  He was more than generous.  He did not like waste of any kind.

He loved children.  So much that he was always involved with the Boumi Temple.  He contributed a great deal to the Shriner's Hospitals for Children. A thirty-second degree mason, too.

It is hard to sum up a life.  He was my UNCLE and I called him that lifelong.  I can't imagine life without him.  There is no one left now.  Only the offspring of my brother and I.  The turnstyle has made another notch.

He was a good boy.  An honorable man.