My Uncle Bear died yesterday. I was at my daughter's horse show when I got the call from Mom. Dad was crying too much to tell me himself.

I wonder what it's like to lose a younger sibling. I have no younger sisters or brothers myself, so I will never know that feeling. I imagine it to be different -- very different -- from losing parents or even an older sister. I imagine it's like a giant swoosh of air, like a wind tunnel, where you experience everything that brother meant to you. Your childhood, your parents, your relationship to everyone else in the family.

My Uncle Onofre, which is Uncle Bear's real name, was the reckless one -- the one who acted on impulse, made friends easily, never took life too seriously. From Dad's memoirs, he wrote this about his little brother:

He was a jolly kid who made friends with practically the entire adult population in the neighborhood. He was always helping some neighbor with his fields, or his animals, or with house chores. People all around were always talking about what a hard worker he was and they were always after him to come help them. He was always willing.

The strange thing about Onofre's industriousness and generosity was that around our own home we had trouble getting him to do anything. My mother would say about him that he was "el candil de la calle, obscuridad de su casa," which translated says, "the light of the street but darkness in his house." But people loved him. He was always whistling. He loved to whistle "Cielito Lindo" so much that some of the boys nicknamed him "Cielito" and it stuck. Years later, people from Costilla who had known him would ask, "Whatever happened to your brother, Cielito?"

Cielito, Uncle Bear, Uncle Onofre. He went on to raise a large family. All his sons served in the military. Uncle Bear lived hard, smoked like mad, got Diabetes -- the "silent killer" among Chicanos. Dad always says, given Uncle Onofre's happy, carefree outlook on life, he should have outlived all the rest of them. But Onofre believed in living life to the fullest, and for him that meant not worrying about how long a life you lived, just that it was lived joyously.

Dad called his little brother about ten days before he died. Onofre could still talk on the phone.

"Hi, Cielito," Dad said to Onofre.

"Hi, Conde," Onofre said back.

"Cielito" means "little sky" or in a religious sense, "little heaven." It captured in its wide blue umbrella all that was Dad's little brother.

"Conde" stood for "Condemnado" -- condemned one. Like the way you might call a beautiful sister "fea" (ugly) or a genius brother "tonto" (stupid), Uncle Onofre called my devout father, "condemned one."

Tomorrow morning I'll drive my mom and dad through Dad's ancestral homelands of Taos and Costilla, to southern Colorado. We'll attend rosary and services on Wednesday morning, visit all afternoon with cousins and other family we haven't seen for years. We'll laugh and cry. We might even sing. Just in his honor.

Until then, I'd like to share these three poems that remind me of my light-hearted, hugable Uncle Bear.



      

Bearhug
by Michael Ondaatje, from The Cinnamon Peeler

Griffin calls to come and kiss him goodnight
I yell ok. Finish something I'm doing,
then something else, walk slowly round
the corner to my son's room.
He is standing arms outstretched
waiting for a bearhug. Grinning.

Why do I give my emotion an animal's name,
give it that dark squeeze of death?
This is the hug which collects
all his small bones and his warm neck against me.
The thin tough body under the pyjamas
locks to me like a magnet of blood.

How long was he standing there
like that, before I came?

Bear
by Mary Oliver, from Why I Wake Early

It's not my track,
I say, seeing
the ball of the foot and the wide heel
and the naily, untrimmed
toes. And I say again,
for emphasis,

to no one but myself, since no one is
with me. This is
not my track, and this is an extremely
large foot, I wonder
how large a body must be to make
such a track, I am beginning to make

bad jokes. I have read probably
a hundred narratives where someone saw
just what I am seeing. Various things
happened next. A fairly long list, I won't

go into it. But not one of them told
what happened next--I mean, before whatever happens--

how the distances light up, how the clouds
are the most lovely shapes you have ever seen, how

the wild flowers at your feet begin distilling a fragrance
different, and sweeter than any you ever stood upon before--how

every leaf on the whole mountain is aflutter.







Clouds
by Mary Oliver, from Why I Wake Early

All afternoon, Sir,
your ambassadors have been turning
into lakes and rivers.
At first they were just clouds, like any other.
Then they swelled and swirled; then they hung very still;
then they broke open. This is, I suppose,
just one of the common miracles,
a transformation, not a vision,
not an answer, not a proof, but I put it
there, close against my heart, where the need is, and it serves

the purpose. I go on, soaked through, my hair
slicked back;
like corn, or wheat, shining and useful.

Yellow Bird, possibly a Kingbird that's been hanging around the
past few days, photo © 2008 by ybonesy. All rights reserved.

-Related to post, Practice: Growing Older - 20min

As she physically declined in the nursing home, she stopped caring for her nails. Instead, she would wait for me to arrive on Sundays. She would look at her hands and say, “My nails sure are long” or “I haven’t had my nails trimmed in a long time” or “My fingernail polish is chipped.” Those were clues that I should find the clippers and the nail file and go to work.

She had never directly asked for anything from me; instead she had relied on me to assume what she wanted and to do it. Many times my assumptions had fallen short of her expectations and she let me know of her disappointment in my failings.

When I could take the subtlety no longer, I would ask, “Mom, do you want me to clip your nails?”

“I wish someone would.” That was the closest to “Yes” that I ever received.

The intimacy of taking her frail hands in my big, powerful ones was almost too much for me to bear. How many times did I say to myself, “Come on, Bob. It is only her hands?"

To hold my mother’s hand connected me to her in a way that I didn’t want. Her inability to care for her most basic needs, her aging, and her impending death flowed into me through her hands.

This woman, who had ruled much of my life, who had consumed me in many ways, sat in her wheelchair and offered me her hands. So much of my life I had distanced myself from her and here I was, in the end, sucked back into her world through her hands.

The last three weeks of her life I noticed her hands every time I visited. Her fingers and hands had become skeletal as her weight had dropped to about 70 pounds. I trimmed her nails one of those weeks.

“I scratch myself,” she had said that afternoon. I held her hand and carefully trimmed the nails making sure that I didn’t pull on her skin or clip her nails too closely because my mother’s top layer of skin had become like plastic wrap and a scratch, however slight, would open her skin and she would bleed profusely..

One week her fingers were pure white and the tiny blue veins that ran down each finger stood out. The backs of her hands were a mass of age spots and bruises, a dark brown mixed with deep purple. The juxtaposition of her fingers to the backs of her hands looked as though someone had grafted the fingers of a stranger onto her hands.

The Sunday before she died her fingers and hands were a dusky, purplish-blue color. Her blood is pooling in her extremities, I thought. I knew from looking at her hands that she would not live that much longer.

She died that Thursday morning at 5:50…Thursday, February 28, 2008.

The mortician erased many of the signs of aging from her face and hands. She looked more beautiful in death than she had in life. Her nails had been trimmed and painted a pale pink. Her hands laid one on top of the other.

I wanted to remember those hands forever -- even after everything else I remember about her disappears from my mind. I raised my camera to my eye, focused on her hands and took the picture.

Bob Chrisman lives in Kansas City, Missouri, where he writes. Natalie Goldberg gave him permission to call himself a writer many years ago, and he has been writing ever since. His writing friends, particularly those from a Goldberg year-long Intensive that he and 23 other students took, have made it possible for him to continue and, thankfully, only occasionally be tossed away.


About writing practice, Bob says: My practice is simple. I meditate for 30 minutes every morning and then do six 10-minute "writes." Sometimes life interrupts the schedule, but I return to it as soon as possible.

As so many writers have suggested, including our teacher, write first thing in the morning before anything interferes with the writing. But, if you can't write in the morning, write sometime during the day. Don't let it slide!

After my mother's death I couldn't always focus for an hour, but I made a commitment to myself to write enough to catch up for the days (or writes) I missed. I did them all. That's how important these six 10-minute writes are to my practice, to my life and to what little sanity I have left.