I suppose a lot of people have that one uncle, the one whose eyes would light up whenever they'd see you, who always had candy or snacks or some other contraband ready to give you whenever Mom wasn't looking, who could never stay mad at you for very long, no matter how damn annoying you might be. For me, that person was my uncle Mark.
Many of my earliest memories include him. My parents divorced when I was a baby (just after my first birthday), and after that, and after a short sojourn of sleeping in her car and on friends' couches, my mom quickly remarried, to an abusive alcoholic who regularly beat her, more than once to the point of hospitalization. From there, she bounced from one guy's apartment to the next, and I with her, until we finally landed at my grandmother's lakeside mobile home, when I was three years old. In that trailer lived my grandmother and grandfather (husband #4 for Grandma), my aunt Carla, my uncle Mark, and then, my mother and me. How in the fuck we all managed to fit into that tiny trailer, I'll never know. But my close bond with uncle Mark was forged in those early days. It was an uncharacteristically happy period of my life, despite (or perhaps, in part, because of) the cramped living quarters. My grandpa regularly took me boating, and the trailer park was actually a fairly tight-knit little community, where everyone knew everyone else. I have vague memories of a few wild parties, at which I was not supposed to be present, but was, thanks to uncle Mark. "Memories" might be a bit strong... more like, flashes of images, three or four frames from a film strip here and there, people dancing, whispers of color, etc. But my uncle Mark was always showing me off, and he was always happy; and his happiness was contagious.
Just shy of my fourth birthday, my mom got her very own place for the first time. It was a run-down old hair salon that had been converted into a two-unit apartment. The place was a dump, but it was ours. (It has since been torn down). One thing that I remember about that tiny apartment was that the living room was extremely small (it had been the waiting room when it was a hair salon, so it was basically wide enough to hold a single row of chairs), and there was only one bedroom. The couch in our living room left only a narrow walkway through it. My mother, at the time determined to be the best mom in the world (and she indeed was for a short while in my life), slept every night on the rickety old couch, giving the bedroom to me, though she would sometimes crawl into bed with me when it was storming. (My mom was always terrified of storms, and even as a child, I was not afraid of them). My uncle Mark visited us quite often in our tiny, shithole apartment. Those too were good days.
In the coming years, my mom would enter her third marriage, a relatively stable one for a stint. And uncle Mark would assume something of a superhero status in my eyes. He was charming, handsome, funny, cool, and confident, with just a dash of shyness. And somehow, I was always the recipient of his "coolness." Uncle Mark gave me my first sip of beer when I was seven years old. He taught me that sunglasses were cool. He was the person who taught me to drive, in his $300 piece of shit pickup truck, that had been a baby shit green color, but the previous owner had attempted to paint black, with a brush, no less, and had clearly run out of black paint midway through, so that much of the baby shit green was still visible. I was driving this hideous monstrosity on a rural gravel road, and uncle Mark's quip that I was going to ruin his pretty paintjob was precisely the thing I needed to make me laugh and calm my nerves. He taught me to ride a motorcycle and instilled in me a lifelong love for motorcycles. In fact, the motorcycle I now have is a Yamaha that I sold to uncle Mark when my son was born. Uncle Mark also gave me my first condoms and one of my first real "sex talks." He was everything "cool" a boy could hope for in an adult male figure. Just bad enough to be cool, but good enough to love with all of his heart. The perfectly human blend of sinner and saint.
Around the time I was graduating from Eastern Illinois University (2004), my uncle Mark suffered a serious ear infection, which eventually found its way into his brain. He ultimately had to undergo surgery to have the infection removed, and in so doing, he suffered damage to his brain that, though not extensive, was significant enough to leave him with a mood disorder that would plague him for the remainder of his life. Soon, my uncle, seeking solitude, bought a mobile home and moved to the old family farm. This had been my grandfather's farm, where my mother had grown up; and on its perimeter was a small plot of land where my mom and dad had lived in a mobile home shortly after they were married, and where I had spent the first year of my life. (Incidentally, it was this mobile home out of which my grandfather evicted my mom and me, in the middle of a summer night, when he discovered that my mom had divorced my dad--content for a later blog post, perhaps). My uncle Mark situated his own mobile home on the very same little plot of land where my parents' trailer had once sat.
Over the next few years, doctors tried prescribing several different antidepressants, but my uncle's rebellious nature, (and his intolerance for the erectile dysfunction that the meds caused him) kept him from faithfully adhering to his medicinal regimen. And as anyone on antidepressants knows, wavering in one's fidelity to their medicinal regimen can seriously fuck with a person's brain. My uncle was no exception, and over the next few years, he wrestled with more and less severe bouts of depression. Despite his good humor and larger-than-life bravado, on the morning of April 21, 2008, my uncle took a 12-gauge shotgun, walked into the field just behind the spot where I had spent my first year of life, sat in a lawn chair, and shot himself point blank in the chest. He was still barely clinging to life when the EMTs arrived, and according to them, my uncle's last words were, "Please, just let me go."
It would be impossible to state how deeply his suicide hit me. If I'm being honest, I think it was really the first death that absolutely decimated me emotionally. Sure, I had lost all of my grandparents by this time, and sure, each death was sad, but none so sad as losing uncle Mark. No one had ever been so integral to my life, so instrumental in my maturation, as uncle Mark. No one had occupied so central a role throughout the entirety of my life, as uncle Mark. His death was the first that literally brought me to my knees in that wave of shock that paralyzes a person when someone who is so extraordinary a part of them dies. Moreover, it was so devastating because it was so shocking. When your grandmother drinks nothing but whiskey, or your grandfather eats his cigars, you kind of expect that their days are numbered. Uncle Mark was only two years older than I am now when he died, and though I knew he had been dealing with depression, I had no idea just how severe it was. I think I deluded myself into believing that his inherent optimism and good humor would ultimately triumph over the darkness. Call it ignorance, I suppose. I didn't understand how mental illness works.
I offer this reflection primarily because I realized the other day that I had passed the April 21 anniversary, and that, for the first time since his death, I didn't take notice. That may be a good thing, as it may signal that the scar has mostly healed. Or it may be a factor of my own mental health struggles. Either way, the realization of having passed the anniversary brought on a wave of sadness and guilt, and it felt right to remember him. As so many of my monumental 'firsts' were with uncle Mark, I suppose it's only fitting that uncle Mark would also be the first of many eulogies that I would be asked to do for family members in the coming years (including my mom and dad). I'm not a particularly religious person anymore, and yet, I also understand that eulogies are not just for the speaker, but for the loved ones, many of whom want to believe that they will see their loved ones again. So I ended the eulogy in a way that was fitting to the character of uncle Mark, who was, and will always be in my memory, the perfect blend of sinner and saint. I ended with two quotes, one from Paul's letter to the church in Rome, and one a line from an Ozzy Osbourne song. It is with these two quotes that I end this reflection.
Romans 8, verses 24 & 25: "For we are saved by hope: but hope that is seen is not hope: for what a man seeth, why doth he yet hope for? But if we hope for that we see not, then do we with patience wait for it."
"Goodbye to romance, goodbye to friends. Goodbye to all the best. I guess that we’ll meet, we'll meet in the end."
Many of my earliest memories include him. My parents divorced when I was a baby (just after my first birthday), and after that, and after a short sojourn of sleeping in her car and on friends' couches, my mom quickly remarried, to an abusive alcoholic who regularly beat her, more than once to the point of hospitalization. From there, she bounced from one guy's apartment to the next, and I with her, until we finally landed at my grandmother's lakeside mobile home, when I was three years old. In that trailer lived my grandmother and grandfather (husband #4 for Grandma), my aunt Carla, my uncle Mark, and then, my mother and me. How in the fuck we all managed to fit into that tiny trailer, I'll never know. But my close bond with uncle Mark was forged in those early days. It was an uncharacteristically happy period of my life, despite (or perhaps, in part, because of) the cramped living quarters. My grandpa regularly took me boating, and the trailer park was actually a fairly tight-knit little community, where everyone knew everyone else. I have vague memories of a few wild parties, at which I was not supposed to be present, but was, thanks to uncle Mark. "Memories" might be a bit strong... more like, flashes of images, three or four frames from a film strip here and there, people dancing, whispers of color, etc. But my uncle Mark was always showing me off, and he was always happy; and his happiness was contagious.
Just shy of my fourth birthday, my mom got her very own place for the first time. It was a run-down old hair salon that had been converted into a two-unit apartment. The place was a dump, but it was ours. (It has since been torn down). One thing that I remember about that tiny apartment was that the living room was extremely small (it had been the waiting room when it was a hair salon, so it was basically wide enough to hold a single row of chairs), and there was only one bedroom. The couch in our living room left only a narrow walkway through it. My mother, at the time determined to be the best mom in the world (and she indeed was for a short while in my life), slept every night on the rickety old couch, giving the bedroom to me, though she would sometimes crawl into bed with me when it was storming. (My mom was always terrified of storms, and even as a child, I was not afraid of them). My uncle Mark visited us quite often in our tiny, shithole apartment. Those too were good days.
In the coming years, my mom would enter her third marriage, a relatively stable one for a stint. And uncle Mark would assume something of a superhero status in my eyes. He was charming, handsome, funny, cool, and confident, with just a dash of shyness. And somehow, I was always the recipient of his "coolness." Uncle Mark gave me my first sip of beer when I was seven years old. He taught me that sunglasses were cool. He was the person who taught me to drive, in his $300 piece of shit pickup truck, that had been a baby shit green color, but the previous owner had attempted to paint black, with a brush, no less, and had clearly run out of black paint midway through, so that much of the baby shit green was still visible. I was driving this hideous monstrosity on a rural gravel road, and uncle Mark's quip that I was going to ruin his pretty paintjob was precisely the thing I needed to make me laugh and calm my nerves. He taught me to ride a motorcycle and instilled in me a lifelong love for motorcycles. In fact, the motorcycle I now have is a Yamaha that I sold to uncle Mark when my son was born. Uncle Mark also gave me my first condoms and one of my first real "sex talks." He was everything "cool" a boy could hope for in an adult male figure. Just bad enough to be cool, but good enough to love with all of his heart. The perfectly human blend of sinner and saint.
Around the time I was graduating from Eastern Illinois University (2004), my uncle Mark suffered a serious ear infection, which eventually found its way into his brain. He ultimately had to undergo surgery to have the infection removed, and in so doing, he suffered damage to his brain that, though not extensive, was significant enough to leave him with a mood disorder that would plague him for the remainder of his life. Soon, my uncle, seeking solitude, bought a mobile home and moved to the old family farm. This had been my grandfather's farm, where my mother had grown up; and on its perimeter was a small plot of land where my mom and dad had lived in a mobile home shortly after they were married, and where I had spent the first year of my life. (Incidentally, it was this mobile home out of which my grandfather evicted my mom and me, in the middle of a summer night, when he discovered that my mom had divorced my dad--content for a later blog post, perhaps). My uncle Mark situated his own mobile home on the very same little plot of land where my parents' trailer had once sat.
Over the next few years, doctors tried prescribing several different antidepressants, but my uncle's rebellious nature, (and his intolerance for the erectile dysfunction that the meds caused him) kept him from faithfully adhering to his medicinal regimen. And as anyone on antidepressants knows, wavering in one's fidelity to their medicinal regimen can seriously fuck with a person's brain. My uncle was no exception, and over the next few years, he wrestled with more and less severe bouts of depression. Despite his good humor and larger-than-life bravado, on the morning of April 21, 2008, my uncle took a 12-gauge shotgun, walked into the field just behind the spot where I had spent my first year of life, sat in a lawn chair, and shot himself point blank in the chest. He was still barely clinging to life when the EMTs arrived, and according to them, my uncle's last words were, "Please, just let me go."
It would be impossible to state how deeply his suicide hit me. If I'm being honest, I think it was really the first death that absolutely decimated me emotionally. Sure, I had lost all of my grandparents by this time, and sure, each death was sad, but none so sad as losing uncle Mark. No one had ever been so integral to my life, so instrumental in my maturation, as uncle Mark. No one had occupied so central a role throughout the entirety of my life, as uncle Mark. His death was the first that literally brought me to my knees in that wave of shock that paralyzes a person when someone who is so extraordinary a part of them dies. Moreover, it was so devastating because it was so shocking. When your grandmother drinks nothing but whiskey, or your grandfather eats his cigars, you kind of expect that their days are numbered. Uncle Mark was only two years older than I am now when he died, and though I knew he had been dealing with depression, I had no idea just how severe it was. I think I deluded myself into believing that his inherent optimism and good humor would ultimately triumph over the darkness. Call it ignorance, I suppose. I didn't understand how mental illness works.
I offer this reflection primarily because I realized the other day that I had passed the April 21 anniversary, and that, for the first time since his death, I didn't take notice. That may be a good thing, as it may signal that the scar has mostly healed. Or it may be a factor of my own mental health struggles. Either way, the realization of having passed the anniversary brought on a wave of sadness and guilt, and it felt right to remember him. As so many of my monumental 'firsts' were with uncle Mark, I suppose it's only fitting that uncle Mark would also be the first of many eulogies that I would be asked to do for family members in the coming years (including my mom and dad). I'm not a particularly religious person anymore, and yet, I also understand that eulogies are not just for the speaker, but for the loved ones, many of whom want to believe that they will see their loved ones again. So I ended the eulogy in a way that was fitting to the character of uncle Mark, who was, and will always be in my memory, the perfect blend of sinner and saint. I ended with two quotes, one from Paul's letter to the church in Rome, and one a line from an Ozzy Osbourne song. It is with these two quotes that I end this reflection.
Romans 8, verses 24 & 25: "For we are saved by hope: but hope that is seen is not hope: for what a man seeth, why doth he yet hope for? But if we hope for that we see not, then do we with patience wait for it."
"Goodbye to romance, goodbye to friends. Goodbye to all the best. I guess that we’ll meet, we'll meet in the end."
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