Though I first met my uncle when I was a young girl and have always known him as a gentle, kind soul with the most beautiful, blue-green sparkling eyes and the best smile in the world, the person who is "Uncle John" to me has always lived through my mom as much as in the man I see and talk to. They grew up best of friends, and I've always delighted in the stories she's told me about their wonderful friendship and his great sense of humor. But I know that I've never quite met the man those stories are about.
Before he went to Vietnam, my Uncle John was a genius whose teachers couldn't keep up with him, so he went to a college for advanced math classes while still in high school. He was also a wonderful artist, whose work I've seen in my Grandma's house. Once in college, he encountered evil in the form of a professor who told his class he would flunk them all so they couldn't use their college education to defer their draft and would have to go to Vietnam. The professor kept his word, and my gentle uncle who was too honorable to dodge the draft came back missing two legs and an eye and with shrapnel in his brain and in a coma.
Though doctors said he'd never wake up, my mom never gave up on her best friend and visited him regularly, reading to him, playing him comedy records, and talking to him, and he did wake up. And one day she rolled him in his wheelchair out of the hospital and out into the world to restart his life.
I saw my uncle whenever I visited my Grandma growing up, and he was perfectly capable of carrying on normal conversations, with a fierce interest in history and a keen ability to tease my mom as he had when they were kids. But I still knew he wasn't who he had been in the stories I'd listen to.
Several years ago, my parents, one of my mom's sisters, and I took him to the Canadian beach town where my grandpa spent some growing up years and had built a cottage and where my mom and her siblings had spent time in summers when they were children. There, as my mom pushed him in his wheelchair fast down the boardwalk and the breeze blew through his hair and a big smile spread across his face and his eyes twinkled like the lake water, I saw in my uncle the long-limbed, vivacious boy I knew he had once been and who I knew through my mom's stories.
As the effects of the brain damage have gotten worse with age, my Uncle John has moved into an assisted living home with a memory care wing. This week my parents and I visited him there.
While going on a wheelchair stroll with him in his facility, I saw a woman who sat in her wheelchair, laughing and laughing, seemingly at nothing, and I wondered who she used to be. Her hair was freshly dyed, and I wondered if someone in her family had done that for her and what stories they could tell about the person she had been, the holidays she had celebrated, the games she had played and jokes she had made. One man sat facing a wall making repetitive motions with his hands. A therapy dog jumped onto his lap and I wondered what the dog knew about the man inside that no one else at the facility did. One very old woman in a different wing outside the memory care unit, just sitting on a bench in the hallway, smiled a huge beautiful smile and asked us how the weather was, and I wished I had time to just stop and talk with and listen to her, and I hoped her family knew how lucky they were that she could have a conversation and understand the moment, and I hoped she had lots of people to talk to about more exciting things than the weather.
When we eventually left and my uncle came with us to the exit, we tried to say our goodbyes, but he stopped talking, turned away, and just kept rolling his chair down the hallway, unable to face the goodbye.
So what I want to say is this: Don't wait for Veterans Day to thank a veteran. Don't wait until tomorrow to tell someone you love them or show someone you care. Don't lose your patience with someone who doesn't understand. Don't make fun of the woman who laughs at things you can't see or the man in a corner who's unresponsive or the guy who asks you how to work the Metro-ticket machine because he can't figure it out. When someone smiles and says hello, smile and say hello back because you don't know when the last time was that they received a smile or a hello or had anyone around to even talk with about the weather. Listen to stories, because sometimes that's where people live fullest.
And never take for granted what and who you have and are today.
Happy Thanksgiving. May it be a meaningful one.
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