When I drove across country in 1988, I wound up spending a week or so at my Grandparent’s house in Tacoma. We had dinner around the kitchen table, did some work in the garage, and listened to stories and such. It was the kind of visit you have with older people when you won’t have many more chances to spend time with them. But I didn’t know what that sort of visit felt like when I was 20. I hadn’t known too many people who got old and died. At 20, most of the people I knew who were old had been old for my entire life.
My Uncle Brian wasn’t old. He was middle aged when I was a kid. He was middle aged in a 1970’s kinda way, like McCloud or even Burt Reynolds. He had a mustache, and liked dirty jokes. He would go scuba diving with us. He liked poker and fishing boats and martinis and Camel cigarettes. The Cigarettes were what eventually killed him. But we had lots of visits before he went, usually fishing trips. One year he was same as he always was, he just went to bed earlier. The next year he wouldn’t climb up to the flying bridge. The final year he’d have to rest a few times on the walk down the dock. Each time we planned the trip, I knew it was the sort of visit you plan in order to spend time with someone who you won’t have too many chances to spend time with.
I had a phone call with my father yesterday. I told him we’d be in Florida and we made plans to get together in Orlando. The phone call started to have that familiar feeling.
I’m not expecting his immediate demise. My grandmother was alive for 15 years after that first visit.
But this phone call, and these plans felt different. Once you start planning your visits with people with the awareness of their finality, the relationship changes. So today I felt a little closer to being an orphan.
