Uncle Paul, my father's younger brother, died at the Veterans' Home up in Caribou, where he's lived for the last year or so, early in the morning of the 18th. He's been in poor health for a long time and having more immediate problems for around a month, so it wasn't totally out of the blue, but he was showing some signs of recovery until very recently and we were, at least, not expecting such a sudden end.

I'll probably post again within the next few days with some reminiscences. We weren't super-close or anything like that, but still, it'll take some time to process.

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Damn. I'm sorry for your family's loss, G.

I'm sorry to hear it, Gryphon. My condolences.

------
Authors of our fates
Orchestrate our fall from grace
Poorest players on the stage
Our defiance drives us straight to the edge

Ahhh, sorry, my condolences. : (

An actual obituary in the Obit Corner, something of a rarity. My aunt Dot (who wrote it) omitted to mention that Paul joined the Coast Guard after leaving the Navy. He didn't talk about it much, I think because he joined hoping to get back to sea and it didn't happen.

In both of his abbreviated service careers, he ran afoul of the US armed forces' institutional obsession with advancement. Lacking ambition, he would have been perfectly happy to spend his entire working life as the lowliest sailor on the ship, swabbing decks, peeling potatoes, and never getting noticed, but the modern-day Navy won't let you do that. Get passed over for (or, as I'm sure was Paul's case, neglect even to seek) promotion, and they throw you out on your ass. It must have been a terrible disappointment.

See... how do I say this? Although none of us has ever been diagnosed with anything, I suspect, based on certain quirks we all share, that the men in my father's side of the family (including myself) are someplace on The Spectrum. In Paul's case, this was... particularly unambiguous. Where Dad and I are creatures of habit to a degree that probably annoys those around us, Paul had a commitment to routine that was outright pathological.

I'm not saying that to try to dunk on the man or anything, I mean, we've all got our own bullshit to deal with. It's just that I think if he had been born in my generation, or maybe the one after, his problems might have been recognized earlier in life and things could have been done to mitigate them, but in the '50s and '60s, he was just considered a Weird Kid and left to muddle through on his own. By adulthood, especially after he had to leave the service, he had to make up for the loss of that structure and external direction by imposing as strict a routine as possible on himself. It was the only way he could be at all comfortable in the chaotic mess that is the Grown-Up World.

Unfortunately, that meant that when anything out-of-pocket cropped up, such as a medical emergency, he had a really hard time coping with it. In his most recent illness, he was so stressed by being out of his accustomed environment that as soon as he was well enough to get himself out of the hospital, he insisted that they take him back to his room in the Veterans' Home. It was too soon—he was improving but not stable—but the doctors couldn't talk him out of it, and neither could my father or Dot. So he went home on Saturday, and Sunday morning he took a sudden sharp downturn and died before the staff could get him back to the hospital.

I'm not really going anywhere with this, I've just been mulling it over a lot this week. We didn't interact much, but I hear echoes of Paul in myself sometimes, and now that a turn of mind that we all used to find exasperating but faintly comical has literally killed him... well, it makes a man think.

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Well, we buried Uncle Paul today. It was a beautiful sunny-but-cool day in Oxbow, and we put him next to his parents in the little cemetery on the river road there.

(Oxbow Cemetery is the only self-service cemetery I know of. This, as my Aunt Dot noted to those assembled at Paul's graveside today, is just how things are done in Aroostook County.)

Dot's a year younger than Paul, but they were in the same grade for most of their time in school and graduated together in the Ashland High class of 1974. Unsurprisingly, today's gathering ended up being as much a class reunion as anything else, and I knew very few of the people there. Still, I don't think I dishonored the Regiment.

Speaking of which, the veteran footstones for Paul and Gramp arrived in time for the former's burial:

The VA never could come up with any records to verify Gramp's much longer service with the Army Reserve, in which he had attained the rank of lieutenant colonel by the time he resigned in the late '60s, so his Regular Army rank is all we've got.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

As the young people say: if I had a nickel for every younger sibling of a parent who's died from complications of chronic respiratory disease in the last month, I'd have 10 cents, which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice.

I just got home from driving my mother to the town where her estranged younger sister Mary lived, and in which she was unexpectedly found dead in her home last week, to collect a copy of her death certificate. As is sometimes the way of these things, Mom found out by receiving a condolence call from another relative who found out first and assumed she would already know.

They, uh... weren't pals, for reasons I'm not going to go into here, but even so, that's a shock to the system.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.