Every family loss is a part of yourself

The Boston Globe

Beverly Beckham

My Uncle Frank died last week. He was 82, but he looked 70. He had thick gray hair and not a wrinkle on his face and he stood straight and he smelled good and he was solid and sturdy, inside and out, and I felt that strength every time I hugged him. I believed, I hoped, he would live forever.

Decades ago, when he was in his 40s, doctors gave him six months to live. They told my Aunt Lorraine and she told her children and me. But she never told him.

Over the years, Frank had some challenges. He had asbestosis, a few heart attacks, and a quadruple bypass. He lost most of a lung and all of a kidney. And he lost my Aunt Lorraine. She died 16 years ago. But he kept on going. He was like Fisher-Price's Bat and Wobble Penguin. No matter how many punches he took and no matter how hard he was hit, he was never knocked down.

That's why when my phone rang early last Wednesday morning and it was my cousin Linda, I didn't think: Something has happened to Frank. I thought, Yay! It's Linda. Maybe she wants to hang out tonight.

Why is it always like this? Why is death a shock every time? It can't be, you think. He was fine. We just talked or I just saw him. No. No. No. How could this happen?

It happens and it stuns you and stops you in your tracks and knocks the world off its axis and yet it doesn't register, doesn't feel real, denial louder than the small voice on the phone that is telling you something you don't want to hear. And you cry or you don't cry. But always, always, always you feel your heart break. Not the body part that science studies and that can be tamed or mended with surgery and pills, but the heart that poets write about, the ephemeral, not-on-any-chart, needs-love-to-survive heart that aches and changes and swells then shrinks every time someone you love dies.

I didn't always love Frank. I didn't even like him when he married my beautiful Aunt Lorraine. I was 7. I was jealous. Plus I thought he looked like Liberace, and I didn't like Liberace, either.

But a few months after they were married, they moved into my house and it was the best part of my childhood. They brought their first baby home and set up a crib in my room, and I went to sleep every night smiling and woke up every morning to a baby looking at me.

One Valentine's Day, years later, when my aunt and uncle had their own house and three of their six children, Frank came in from work with Valentine hearts for everyone, including me. A box of candy is a small thing, really. But if there is an exact moment when you realize you love someone, this was it. I wasn't a little kid. And I wasn't his kid. I was a teenager. Yet he had remembered me.

Frank has been in my life for longer than anyone else, now, longer than my oldest friend. "Remember?" I would say. "Remember that green car you had with those thick white walls?" "Remember when you lived on Chalk Street?" "Remember when you wouldn't let me borrow your library card?" He remembered.

We didn't talk on the phone or e-mail or write letters. Seasons would pass and we wouldn't be in touch. But then he'd stop by, his visits random and unexpected, and I would always be so glad to see him.

After Lorraine died, he stopped by with a garden stone engraved with the words: "Where love is concerned, too much is not enough." I walk past that stone and I walk past their wedding picture, which hangs on my wall. And my heart swells then shrinks because I have lost him and a little more of me.