Uncle Max - WHY AND WHY NOT by Nelson A. Navarro

NEW YORK – You know you’re getting on in years when going to funeral parlors and nursing homes becomes a more or less regular activity.

Between visiting the dead or the aging, I’d rather deal with the first. You go to pay respects to the departed and to condole with the survivors. What’s done is done and everybody puts up a brave face, some more bravely than others. Then it’s all over and you go separate ways again.

Commiserating with the old who are also infirm gives you the creeps. It always leaves a lump in your throat. If you say nice things, you sound insincere. If you harp on the bad news, you’re adding to the misery. It takes forever to figure out that the best formula is just to be there and shut up. Being there to answer the attendance call is what counts.

Of course, nothing beats dealing with dearly beloved relatives who are in mid-passage between terminal illness and open-ended death. Much as you want to be in control of your feelings, you cannot help but face a flood of emotions that’s at once beautiful and terrifying.

Beautiful because the old happy days flash before your very eyes. No matter how humble or tormented anybody’s life has been, what sticks out in the end are the simple joys and the long-forgotten moments of tenderness. Memories are meant to be golden, therefore highly selective. You recall what makes you laugh, not what makes you cry.

But indulging or wallowing in pleasant memories also sets you up for more grief. All that happiness and caring and hope that once gave life a meaning end up crumbling into dust. Those we love and care about have to go away, never to return. And soon it will be our turn to sign off forever.

All these contrary feelings surged into my mind on a recent visit to my favorite uncle at a nursing home in the West Coast. It was one family duty I dreaded most but had to fulfill anyway.

Now pushing 81, my uncle has had two strokes, the last one so literally crippling he had to be, in American parlance, "institutionalized." Practically all his vital powers are gone. Confined to bed or wheelchair, unable to eat and fed only through intravenous means, he can’t talk, write or communicate with anybody. His visitors do all the talking and he emits strange sounds that you interpret into whatever you wish to interpret. It’s as if he had been swallowed whole by a wall of silence, his once-robust body all but an empty shell.

As I bent forward to hold his hand, he looked at me with the blank eyes of somebody whose mind wasn’t there anymore. All I could do was gurgle a few banalities about being so glad to see him and, before I could make a bigger fool out of myself by bursting into tears, I fled the room.

How could somebody as bright and talented and dynamic as my uncle be reduced to this travesty of a life? It seemed a fate more cruel and painful than death itself.

Some of my irreverent relatives quietly blame a lifetime of wanton meat and cholesterol. Others say certain family disappointments had gotten the better of him. But I consider these explanations too pat and too convenient. Perhaps the mystery is deeper and we will never know why.

My uncle had been a journalist and a preacher, more the second than the first. Educated by evangelical Christians in America, he and his wife and the family they raised lived the straight and narrow life. When his Philippine career was over in the 1960s, they immigrated en masse to the States.

But what I remember most about Uncle Max was that he was a restless globetrotter. He was my walking geography lesson. As a growing boy in Bukidnon, I was on the receiving end of a steady flow of postcards from all corners of the globe – London, Paris, New York, Berlin as well as truly forbidding places like Beijing, Moscow, India and Africa.

Two of his daughters later became flight attendants, I figured out, just so he could indulge his travel addiction up to the very week he was forever decommissioned by that nasty second stroke. With airline discounts or not, he and his dutiful wife scrimped on everything except travel.

Perhaps what appalls me about Uncle Max’s present condition is that it’s a clear and unmistakable signal that all good things like travel and life itself must come to pass. And more sooner than later. I also realize that if he had a choice, he would had loved a direct flight to heaven rather than a tortuous route with too many connections and too many chances of being marooned somewhere along the way.

But then again, it’s the gods up there who’re in charge of reservations and, indeed, the control towers of life. All we can do is wait and hope and, yes, pray for that upgrade to eternal rest.

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Nelson A. Navarro’s e-mail address: <[email protected]>