Word Petals
The first time I gave a eulogy was thirty years ago for my favorite uncle. It started with “you can’t pass unless you give me a nickel, dime, and quarter.” At four years old I stood in a doorway with my arms stretched and repeated the saying whenever he came home. He was living with our family after his discharge from the army in WWII. In his late sixties, he was diagnosed with liver cancer and once again went to stay with my parents. He and his wife lived in a pre-war New York apartment complex, an area he wanted so much to leave for the suburbs of New Jersey. However, his wife couldn’t make the move. When he learned in the late eighties that with chemotherapy, he had only a ten percent chance of survival, he opted out of treatment and asked if he could live out his time in my parents’ home in NJ.
It was early September and I would visit frequently, bringing him cookies, cakes, and a tart made with Italian plums that are only in season for a few weeks in early fall. One day he asked me to drive him and his wife back to his apartment to collect some things. We started out late morning on a Tuesday and I drove the couple down the eastside of Manhattan to their building on Monroe Street. “Stay here,” he said, “we won’t be long.” When he returned, he was carrying a dark blue suit swaying on a clothes hanger over a white dress shirt and a knotted blue and white stripe tie. In his other hand was a brown paper bag holding shined black shoes. I didn’t need an explanation for the items he wanted to collect.
It was six weeks from the time he came to my parents’ home that he took to his bed for several days. When I visited him, he told me “I’m so tired and she won’t let me sleep.” They shared a queen size bed and he demonstrated how she shoved him in the ribs with her elbow, asking him to wake up throughout the night. I convinced his wife to sleep in another room for a few nights and promised him a good night sleep as I sat nearby. His body needed only one night to move his quiet snoring into labored breathing in search of the signal gurgle. He died peacefully on my watch.
From that moment I was propelled to write his eulogy and have written several more since. They are my dropped petals of love.