Goodbyes at Christmastime

A dear friend, Susan, sent an e-mail to say that, just as she's prepping her annual Christmas party, she's learned that an uncle is in his last hours, and she should go to his side.

Though her words may suggest devotion, this is not entirely the case: "I have something of regret for an obligation not met", she wrote about the last five years, when he was in a nursing home.

She said,  

"I think he loved us kids although he was more interested in drinking when he came to visit. This was an embarrassment to my father."

and

"Charlie molested every woman he could get his hands on. He would shake hands with his right hand and reach for the breast with the other. Few women objected out loud. 'That's just Uncle Charlie' they would say. My ex nearly broke his arm once after I told him that Charlie did this and I didn't like it."

My reply included a reminiscence of my father's brother, Jerome, a blunt, blustery hard drinker whose visits to us were rare but fraught. My father, the brother who made good, both loved him and felt an obligation. Finally, after a week-long stay that damaged her house and nerves, my mother blacklisted Jerome, so Dad saw him only on visits to Chicago.

I responded to my friend, saying the truism that we ought to grieve every family member to the same extent is as false as the one that says that women ought to tolerate being groped.

Many families have an Uncle Charlie, a relative tolerated rather than welcomed, eventually pushed to the edges of the clan. 

I thought, hearing my friend swing between consternation and caring, you reap what you sow. If we hope to be remembered with an abiding place in the heart, we shape that possibility in the present. "Set me as a seal upon thine heart...", the poetic Song of Solomon entreats, "for love is strong as death."

Charlie's past behaviour notwithstanding, Susan put aside her baking to sit with him. He is family, and she is capable of such kindness and compassion.