My Favorite Uncle

No one told a better story. No one told a story better.

That’s my Uncle Jay, storyteller extrordinaire. I’d lean into the table in whatever restaurant we were in as he told stories of the characters and adventures in his life.

Jay married into the family, married my mom’s sister, Norma.

For the past 17 months, it was a three-way contest: cancer, chemo, or him.

The chemo won.

Jay was 69, I think.

For several weeks I’d had a trip scheduled to Arkansas to visit my mom, Aunt Norma and Uncle Jay. I almost didn’t go because Monday’s surgery had left me miserable. But on Thursday evening, I got a second wind and Dave and I left for the Arkansas hills.

Friday evening, we visited my aunt and uncle in their home. Jay sat in the recliner and was feeling pretty good, mixing his “nasty” chocolate Ensure with coffee, to dilute the sweetness.

He told stories, as usual. With the flooding in Arkansas, he talked about the time he took his boys on a canoe trip on a swollen Current River – and didn’t realize until they were downstream a bit – how dangerous the situation was. But at that point there was no getting off the water – they just had to ride it and hope for the best. “If one of those canoes had tipped over, there’s no way I could’ve saved any of us, the river was just too strong.”

Jay, a retired radiologist, often told wild stories from his days in a city hospital in Memphis – which had a rough clientele on a Saturday night. He and Norma love to laugh and to make others laugh, and at mealtime, those stories were always the laughing kind.

On Saturday night, Jay wasn’t feeling well and was transported to a hospital. When we left the hospital later, he seemed to be perking up a bit. But a call came in the morning that he wasn’t doing well. As we stepped into his hospital room Sunday morning, he turned his head and greeted us by name. About an hour or so later, he was gone.

It’s one thing to lose a favorite uncle, but my heart aches for my Aunt Norma, my cousins Cindy, Doug, Al and Dave. They have lost a husband, a father, a solid and steady cornerstone of the family foundation.

And the world has lost a good, kind man.

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I have better photos, but the photo above is one I could easily find. It was taken last April.

My brother, Leon, wrote a nice tribute this morning: The River’s Way.