Larry

It hits me as I am getting ready for bed, thinking of the UFO interview I recently did. My mother reliably sent my uncle Larry all my media about Bigfoots, aliens, and the paranormal world, which he enjoyed, having had experiences or opinions. He never saw my interview. He was too incapacitated in the hospital to bother with a video--and my nervous laughter about Disclosure would not be where one would start. Now, he never will see it.

It is something we had in common, though we only communicated about it by proxy my mother: I wouldn't have known how to contact him more directly.

He gave me an antler he suggested was alien proximal, which I kept around my living room because I thought it was cool. Amber suggested once leaving it in the woods to return to the earth, but I declined and am grateful for this now.

I go upstairs to check on it. It is the only keepsake of him I will get (aside from a card that says I donated to the police, which I am supposed to covertly slip to the officer if I am pulled over). The antler is better than I deserve. I move it to my altar.

He died, of course. I do not write things like this for the living, these lists of vague regret that things were not different with the acknowledgment they could not be in any way I can fathom.

I can only tell you a little about Larry beyond the biographical. He had three daughters: Beth, Stephanie, and Emily. Their mother and his wife, Maureen, died so long ago that I never formed a memory of her and feel we never met. The girls are all my age and well-married. Larry's partner of some years was Elaine.

I do not excel at closeness in general, though mainly with members of my extended family. It's not in my programming and does not indicate Larry's worth.

Months ago, he went into the hospital to have some minor heart issue taken care of. I did not internalize the specifics, only that people with a five or below on some scale were told to live their lives and check back if it worsened. Larry had a five-point five. The girls urged him to take care of it sooner so he didn't have to worry about it going forward.

The surgery worked. The surgery had a complication. Encouraged by my cousin Kyle, a nurse at the hospital where Larry was treated (likely the reason he was treated there), the doctors tried different strategies to correct what went wrong, causing new conditions. One treatment caused an aneurysm. Another scarred his lungs, so they put him in a medically induced coma to allow them to heal, which was a precipitous shove down the slippery slope.

He would briefly rally, talking with Elaine and the girls, then he would worsen and either fall unconscious or be put there. After many setbacks, the medical team gathered the involved parties and said his organs were failing. It would take a miracle for him to survive. His family learned he would pass the same day.

I saw the text as I got in my car after work. I called my father to figure out how my mother was. I could not contact her directly because she might be unable to communicate how she was. I was not ready to shoulder the burden of that.

He said my mother had already spoken to my deceased grandmother to let her know she should expect Larry, and my grandmother had told her that she was ready to receive her son and would take care of him. I had my father clarify that my mother had not driven to the cemetery where we all have plots to do it directly--she had not.

His daughters put the phone to Larry's ear so my mother could say goodbye, but he was beyond responding.

From getting that text until the receipt of the final one that he had died took fewer than three hours. I was walking back from getting ice cream with Amber when I saw.

My mother strained or severed her family relationships in Larry's dying, trying to urge treatment from the sidelines, then to have him moved near to where he lived, then texting his daughter a month ago that they all ought to say goodbye and let him die. This latter tack went over poorly.

She found out Larry's condition third or fourth hand because of this, screencapping texts sent to our family group chat every few days. We were involved tangentially, and our knowledge of Larry's condition was presumed but never directly addressed.

I weep several times through the night, open and unembarrassed. My father tells me to contact my mother, who writes that she wishes someone would have lowered him into a warm bath so his body could relax one last time. I tell her of the Hershey's Kisses animal hospitals give to the dogs about to be euthanized, called final kisses because no dog should die without having tasted chocolate. Death should be peaceful, but I cannot know how much Larry was present in his body at the end, if the death was entirely natural, or if the girls had to make the decision to turn off his life support.

My mother is grateful and perhaps surprised I go to the memorial service held days after his birthday.

I prefer to attend more weddings than funerals. Amber and I have attended nine wakes since meeting and would have had another, except that my uncle George opted to do without. Some funerals were direct--grandparents--and some attenuated--Kate's brother and Amber's coworker. A few deaths haunt me. A few times a week, I am still irritated by Melissa's unnecessary and maybe inevitable death.

Amber comments there is less of a pall of mourning over the funeral home than they expected, "only three or four people are sad." It could be that Larry had been in the hospital for months, giving us ample time to process what might happen.

Elaine openly weeps through her daughter's speech.

His daughter Beth mentions how she wanted a sign from her father after his death. There was a glorious rainbow stretching states--I saw it all over social media but not in person--which she believes was Larry.

The police play taps, followed by a little of "America the Beautiful," then present his eldest daughter, Stephanie, with the folded flag.

He was also a mason, and I thought there would be something from them, but it was perhaps done more secretly, in keeping with the vibe.

My cousin Jesse plays Israel Kamakawiwo'ole's version of "Somewhere over the Rainbow" to close the service.

My mother cannot handle going to the gathering after at the Hudson House. Originally, I thought she would just go home. She then suggested she wished to eat dinner with her immediate family to soothe herself. When she tells this to Elaine, she clutches my mother's hand and tells her to have a drink in honor of Larry.

My most formative memory of Larry is a weaving of being told it happened and a few flashes of feeling and pictures.

He was a police officer near the Bronx Zoo, where my family was visiting. I don't know what circumstances led to him putting my brothers and me in the back of his squad car and driving us through the zoo with lights flashing. This was easily thirty-five years ago, and haziness is warranted. I remember looking at giraffes and fearing someone would think I, a grade-schooler, had committed some animal-based felony.

He once told me that police officers would drag race on the Taconic Parkway, which sounds terrifying. I assume he must have done this at least once. He was a mainstay of our family parties until he moved, mustached, and with a slightly swaggering irreverence.

Amber doesn't know how to comfort me, and I don't know how to be comforted. I need to mourn and process, but I don't know what I am mourning.

last watched: Futurama
reading: Absolution