On grief, regret, and redemption
The last text messages I exchanged with my Uncle Mark were on January 9, at the end of the week following the Georgia Senate runoff elections and insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. He was lamenting that the victories of now-Sens. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff had been clouded over and robbed of the attention they deserved by the subsequent acts of domestic terrorism on our seat of government.
I replied: “Yep. The Georgia senators would have been a much bigger story if not for what happened the very next day. Tragic.”
And that was it. Now those words of mine are frozen in time, because they were the last ones I ever wrote to him — although at the time I obviously had no idea that they would be. If only I had.
In the wee hours of last Tuesday morning, he was rushed to the hospital and underwent several emergency surgeries that night and in the days to follow. On Friday afternoon, we lost him. He was just 63.
I think I sobbed more on Friday than I have for many, many years prior to this moment—obviously in part because of immense sadness and grief over the loss, but also an unescapable sense that I had failed him.
I had known for many months that he was ill, but I never asked him about it. I never even asked him how he was doing, even as I periodically communicated with him on other matters. Instead, I got updates from his sister, my mother. In that final text exchange with him from last month, I almost followed up with a simple text just asking him how things were going. But I never sent it. And now it absolutely kills me that I didn’t. What doors might I have opened if I had?
And why didn’t I? I suppose because it would have been deeply uncomfortable for me. Obviously that’s extraordinarily selfish and also just generally a horrible, contemptible reason. But it’s also honest, albeit not an excuse. I am a fallible person.
Mark was a man with whom I often had trouble communicating simply because our styles of doing so were always so very different. I often found him to be opaque and cryptic, as though I had to try to figure out the obscure point he was trying to make. I don’t doubt that he was often frustrated with me when I wasn’t able to — or when I didn’t adequately respond to him because of that. Sometimes I’d get lengthy emails from him that I didn’t know how to respond to, so I just didn’t. And he would call me out on that.
In a word, it’s as though he and I missed each other in this earthly life, each because of our own human frailties and limitations. Such is often the reality of our mortal existence, I think: Eternity is written into the human heart, and somewhere in our souls we have implicit knowledge of that truth even if we cannot articulate it, so we make movements toward it. But the innate traumas, pitfalls, and imperfections of this harsh, often unforgiving ephemeral life — and our experiences in it — prevent us from fully realizing it while we remain mortal flesh and blood. We are blocked in this temporal realm from fully seeing one another, and often we hurt each other deeply because of that.
To that end, Mark had a very difficult life by any measure, largely due to circumstances beyond his control. Yet there is no doubt at all that he deeply longed to connect—and stay connected—with the people he loved. It didn’t seem to bother him if he wasn’t always successful. It was as though he knew deep down that he had an eternal bond to certain people and never stopped working toward it, up to the very end.
Eternity is written into the human heart, and somewhere in our souls we have implicit knowledge of that truth even if we cannot articulate it, so we make movements toward it.
To illustrate but one example of that point: Mark was one of the most avid readers of this blog of mine. If he were here right now, he’d be one of the very first to read this post. He would often comment or text or email me separately with his thoughts — sometimes to tell me that I was brilliant and other times to say, in so many words, that it was the stupidest thing he’d ever read. Sometimes he drove me batshit crazy, as I’m sure I did him. Doesn’t matter a bit. What I realize now is that it was never really about his take, or mine, on any given issue. It was about his commitment to staying in touch, no matter where life took us.
Perhaps that’s because of the instrumentality he had in the very roots of my own story. My father made the important point yesterday that if it had not been for Mark, he and my mother never would have connected. And obviously if they had never connected, neither I nor my sister would exist. Nor would her children, my nephews.
As such, despite the very real adversity that he faced in his life, Mark is a case study on the notion that one need neither worry about nor strive for some requisite level of earthly accomplishment or significance, as so many spend their lives doing. Simply being who you are can be more than enough to leave behind an enormously positive legacy for so many others, even if you don’t realize it. What I’ve long believed is thus affirmed here: We’re each destined to walk this planet at a very particular moment in time, for a very particular purpose — one that we likely cannot comprehend while we’re in it, but one whose impact can last long after we’re gone and serve as an integral thread in a much larger story that is still being written and wouldn’t be possible without our presence in it.
Simply being who you are can be more than enough to leave behind an enormously positive legacy for so many others, even if you don’t realize it.
It pains me greatly that Mark won’t be able to respond to this post. However, I have a hopeful vision that somehow he is seeing it from the Great Beyond, in a place of peace, comfort, redemption, wholeness, and love, where he can read or hear these words that I never had the courage or maturity to tell him in this life. In that place, I hope he sees with total clarity what his purpose was and what a difference it has made. It brings to mind for me these immortal words from 1 Corinthians in Scripture: “For now we see as through a glass, dimly, but then, face to face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know, even as I also am known.”
I had the opportunity on Friday to say goodbye to Mark over the phone. (Tragically also, we had not seen each other in person for at least a year due to the pandemic, despite the fact that I again lived within an hour of where he did after many years of living far away.) He was not able to speak and thus did not say anything back, although I believe he heard me.
However, my biggest fear — and regret — is that the words I said to him might have rung hollow to him in that moment because of the myriad opportunities I failed to take to show him my gratitude while I still could. As someone wrote in a note to me just now, “We always think we’ll have more time. Then we don’t.” It’s a powerful and sometimes brutal lesson to learn as we all get older.
But I do not believe this to be the end of the story. The most common expression of goodwill in our culture to those who have passed on is “rest in peace.” There’s a reason for this, I think: It’s a recognition that the person is no longer bound by the toils, trials, or tribulations of this broken world and thus can indeed rest in a place of peace, no matter what challenges or personal traumas they faced on Earth.
I envision Mark in this place right now; his personality was the sort that renders ridiculous the notion that one’s soul ceases to exist simply because of the death of the physical body. Accordingly, I envision that he is now reunited with loved ones who went before him and that he now has the chance to understand and reconcile with those with whom he did not have a good relationship in life. Similarly, I envision that someday I’ll join him there, and we’ll have a conversation about many things we never could express in our mortal lives. We’ll each see each other for who we always were, the bond we always had, and the story that was written because of it. Most of all, I expect that it will feel as though we’re just picking up where we left off.
For now we see as through a glass, dimly, but then, face to face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know, even as I also am known.
Until that time, Uncle Mark, rest in peace. And thank you—thank you in so many ways that I failed to tell you while we still both walked this Earth.
