I have always had an Uncle Lynn. I am guessing that you, O Reader, cannot say the same; most people do not have an Uncle Lynn. That’s a rare commodity.
He hated his name. Once I asked my mother why didn’t he just go by his middle name, but she assured me he felt his middle name was worse than his first, and she wouldn’t even tell me what it was. She knew that I might tease him; he was a teasing kind of uncle, and elicited teasing for it. His middle initial was “A.”
His last name was Hawkins, a strong name if ever there was one. His boat was the Hawk’s Nest, and I was always grateful to him for buying it, and taking us out on it, and showing me, patiently, how to coil and tie and wrap the lines; for letting me man the tiller and hold the sheet; for feeding in me what my grandfather had first engendered: a love for sailing.
Before he bought the Hawk’s Nest he’d had a Hobie Cat, a slender and dual-hulled beauty that literally sang when the wind caught her just right. When the wind was high, she would rise on one hull and I would cling, with trembling smile, to the tarp. He would grin at me and check the sail and grin. He kept the Hobie, as he later did the Hawk’s Nest, with meticulous care: everything was coiled and folded and bagged and zipped and labeled. It was a work of art, really, the way he kept his boats. I liked to watch him getting ready for and cleaning up from a sail. I found his precision compelling.
Sometime in middle or high school we shortened his name to “Unc.” Sometimes we called him “Uncle,” but we hardly ever called him “Uncle Lynn” anymore. “Unc” suited him, and he liked it, and he was, after all *the* uncle, the only uncle on my mother’s side. He was also, my mother told me once, my godfather, in a manner of speaking. I had asked her about godparents; it seemed everyone in the fairy tales had them, and I wondered about mine. Yes, she told me, if something were to happen to her and my father, then my sisters and I would be reared by Annie and Unc. That made perfect sense to me.
After all, my two cousins were already like brothers; our two families, when together, felt like the only families in the world; the eleven of us (when you included our grandparents) were the only people in the world, really. I felt the need of no one else.
Every summer, Annie and Unc had each of us stay with them for one week while the others were at my grandparents’ house. So for one week we had a turn at being the only girl in a family of little brothers, but for all that difference, it didn’t feel much different from being home. I learned to iron on my uncle’s shirts; I learned to change diapers on baby Benjamin; I was loved just as much there as I was at my own house.
And it never seemed to faze him, having a daughter in addition to his sons. He would simply tease or scowl as the occasion warranted, and never complained about sharing a bathroom, and accepted me like his very own.
He read a lot, and sighed sometimes, and laughed suddenly at a high pitch. He had cookies before dinner every day after work, and I envied his privilege. He had a way of smiling at me and squinting his eyes, and ever so slightly waggling his head so that I knew absolutely he was teasing. And when he prayed aloud before meals, his voice was very gentle, and I loved the way he said the name “Jesus.”
He was tired; he was ill. He had to sell the boat, but he bought a motorcycle, and that made me glad. He often sat in his chair by the window in the den and watched the birds outside, and watched Ben’s snake inside. He read, he thought; and he wrote, when he wanted to, powerful prose.
He became alive to the fact– years late, I think– that I had foregone the “Becky” moniker of my childhood for the more sophisticated “Rebecca.” He complained that he now had the trouble of three syllables instead of two when he wished to speak of me. So to appease him, I changed his name yet again: “Oh Captain, My Captain,” I called him, because of the boats, you see. There, I told him, now I have far more syllables than you to deal with. And I told him that it came from a poem by Walt Whitman, and that it was a poem about Abraham Lincoln. My uncle was pleased.
Whitman’s poem is a kind of eulogy, as I suppose this that I am writing is one as well. But if this is a eulogy, then it is early and incomplete. My Uncle Lynn died on Thursday, and there is nothing about that statement that feels anything like real or believable to me. I have always had an Uncle Lynn, and now I don’t.
A eulogy praises a life, and this writing is incomplete because it can’t begin to touch on the ways his life touched mine, on the quiet influences of his love and dignity, on what it means to be simply and utterly loved by someone and to love someone simply and utterly, then to have that someone gone. Grief is a long road, and we have just begun to walk it.
I will miss you, O Captain, My Captain, for the rest of my life.
