338 Image-Content-Blog of the Day 2019/01/27 of-by patrick wey https://blog.patrickwey.com/category/image-content-of-the-day
My Uncle Alex, my fathers brother. I never knew him well at all. He lived in Detroit. I never knew my father much at all, either. I have a son in Brazil. I don’t know him at all. Sometimes things happen for a reason, sometimes things don’t happen at all. Most of the time, things take much too long to get resolved. Issues that make no sense at all when you’re sitting near the end of the trail. Things that could have been, gone, things twisted around realities into dreams half done, love spread out across fields of regret and yet somehow everything is just fine just the way it is.
I would have liked to have got to know my Uncle and my father more. One moment around dusk i was sitting with my dad as we watched the sun sail into the horizon from a front porch at my sisters ( Trudy Schmidt) home where he spend his last few years in a little northern town called Douglas. For the first time in my life we felt all the questions had been answered about a past long gone and we shared a beautiful moment of father and son watching, listening, caring. My father always wished for a family reunion and in two weeks from that setting sun, Uncle Alex and his eight children were all showing up outside Kitchener for a get together with us eight kids and lots of off-spring. I had only met one cousin the summer before. That Saturday afternoon arrived and i was on my way to the country hall for the reunion. An urge to stop at a spot that meant a lot to me concerning my dead brother Bill situated on a bend in the road where we had moments together. I stopped and i felt that strange feeling when things are understood from a realm that is too mysterious, too sacred to attempt to describe. Possibly that was the moment my father spoke to me with the powers of deadly silence.
I arrived a little late and everyone was inside the hall. One cousin was outside and introduced himself to me. He looked like the one i had met the year before, an older brother i believe. He said, “you don’t know do you”.
Some how i then knew. My father had passed away on the way to the reunion that he worked so hard to make happen. It happened.
A few kilometers away in the back seat with a niece and my sister and her husband in the front travelling down a gravel road with a stretch of trees over hanging creating a shaded tunnel with light just waiting at the other end as if for enlightenment. My brother in law Joe mentioned the extraordinary beauty of that natural tunnel and my father with a long soft mystical voice answered, “yes” and died. No warning, no reason, work accomplished and time to go we suppose.
Perhaps, sadness makes one feel alive. Many melancholy moments in winds blowing free thru the softened memories so silently fading thru-out our minds makes it all worthwhile somehow as we drift in and out of each others hearts.
There is no revelation here, simply life and then death and a mellow smile.
Image circa 90’s
