“ I mean, you know, obviously it’s not like there’s a waitlist for dying. Any one of us could get run over by a Snapchatting teen at any moment. And you would think that knowing that would make us more adventurous, and kind, and forgiving. But it makes us small, and stupid, and petty.” -Bojack Horseman
My most recent interactions with my mother’s brother, my Uncle David, were non-interactions. He was, by this time in my life, the epitome of THAT Uncle on Facebook. Jokes about me looking Japanese were met with comments of “Banzai.” He would send me pictures of all the new guns he was buying. When I posted about getting the COVID vaccine, he commented that there was no way he was ever going to “let that snake spit enter my body.”
And we laughed a little to ourselves about him, my family and friends. David Robinson, the overweight, diabetic, hypertensive former tanker who was prepping for the downfall of society and the ensuing anarchy that, and he would admit this, would do him in within a couple days because he would run out of insulin. He was the subject of one of my first poems (an elementary school Justin, upon finding him sleeping shirtless on the couch one day, penned and left a note beside him reading, “Lookie, Lookie, as I sleep/Fat and hairy like a sheep” The nickname stuck.) Undeterred by such things as the frailty of the human body, he rebelled against any perceived tyranny, government or parental, prepared for the end of days with firearms and food stocks, and also had to undergo surgery for one of the many ailments plaguing him.
It turned out that he wouldn’t have to wait to the end of the world for his life choices to catch up with him. He called my mother from the hospital at eight thirty in the morning, high on the drugs given him, to wish her and her deceased twin sister a happy birthday. We received the call he coded around nine that night.
One of the more unique impulses in death is the turn thoughts take to the living. As I drove back from my apartment to my parents’ house, around fifteen minutes after having just gotten back from mom’s birthday party, my thoughts were first about her. My mother has now outlived both of her siblings, and as an older sibling myself it is a kind of pain I cannot possibly imagine. My grandparents, meanwhile, have outlived two of their three children, an upset to the natural order on a incomprehensible magnitude. My mother’s thoughts, meanwhile, turned to David’s girlfriend, who was driving to the hospital to see David as I arrived at the house. After making tea for the family, and the natural embraces and tears that follow revelations of death, we took on the task of informing others in our family and friend group. Only when the practical matters were settled did the proper mourning commence and the weight of the loss hit.
My mother’s brother died on her birthday.
Uncle David was nothing if not larger than life (and if you had ever seen him, you would understand just how significant a compliment this is). He was my German uncle, the beginning of my love of military history, of firearms, and of learning languages. He was also a man who embodied the contradictions of living honestly. A Gulf War tank driver convinced he could fight the US Government in a civil war. An intellectual rebel my family nicknamed “The Sheep.” A smoker who survived symptomatic COVID, convinced the vaccine was “snake spit.” A man who lost feeling in his feet from vascular disease who bought a stick-shift mustang. A man with a stubbornly unbreakable spirit, and an all-too frail body because of it.
He will be missed, and the regrets and sorrow from his loss will echo for years. I don’t know whether he will be remembered more for being endearing or difficult, or endearing because of just how difficult he could be. It will always be said that he lived on his terms, and as a result, certainly left on his terms. There’s a luck and a strength to that I do think few possess, and it’s what I will attempt to remember him for.
That, and that he was the first to nickname me “The J-Man,” words I even now hear in his voice as I write them.
And now, when people ask why I decided to study German, I will have to tell them that I had an Uncle who lived in Germany.
Auf Wiedersehen, David.