Secret Anniversaries, Part I

“The holiest of all holidays are those
Kept by ourselves in silence and apart,
The secret anniversaries of the heart.”
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Tomorrow is an anniversary of the heart, one year from the day my uncle died from a combination of cardiac arrest, sepsis, and negligence on the part of the Atlanta hospital whose care he was under.

I don’t need an anniversary to remember, though. I think of it every day. I think, I am a girl who has no Uncle Tom.

And although I won’t be celebrating, I can’t let this anniversary pass in silence, as I’m sure others close to me plan to. One year since my uncle died, one year since I found I had no words to express how I felt at his passing.

It came at a busy time. The semester was rounding to its close, and I was scheduled to leave for Washington on Wednesday, to accompany my fiancé on a second interview at the university that now employs him.

It came unexpectedly. Two days earlier I had been dining with my parents and the twin brother of my uncle who died, when my dad mentioned that he had received a phone call from Tom’s wife, wondering where her husband was. Did my dad know? Tom wasn’t answering his phone.

He had been at the doctor’s, who sent him to the hospital for dehydration, probably related to the pneumonia the doctor suspected he was suffering from.

We laughed fondly. So typical. Tom waits until he’s really sick to go to the doctor, then loses his phone. He was always losing, forgetting, misplacing things, it seemed, every time he came home to Kentucky to visit: keys, pillow, socks, ugly tie. He left pieces of himself everywhere. Yes, this was our Thomas.

Can you understand how I had no words when I got a strained phone call from my mother, telling me she was in Atlanta and Thomas had died?

Was it the shock? Was it the grief, too immense to be corralled, contained on the page? Had I been able to say something, to write something, I may not have been so lost. I could have used those lines of print as a guide. I could have used the words, the characters, like a trail of bread crumbs to introspection and to understanding. I could have grabbed the tail of a comma and hung on. But there was nothing. Words failed. I failed.

I want to say it all: everything I couldn’t, everything I wanted to, everything I owe him. I want to honor my uncle, and I want to it be everything it should be.

I’m afraid, though, that I won’t be able to do him justice. I’ll be making several small attempts over the next few days. This is one.

Uncle Tom, I may be quiet, but I was never without something to say. Only you could reduce my word count to zero. Spending a year thinking about you, about your life and its abundance, has returned me to my own.

Now, let me honor you.