Uncle Steve

About 50 years ago, my Uncle Steve, right before Christmas, took down his 30.06 hunting rifle, put the cold blued steel barrel in his mouth, and blew his brains out, all over the ceiling and back wall of the apartment in which he was living with his wife and six kids.
It made quite a mess. Every once in a while I hear my Uncle Gil talk about how much trouble it was to clean up. It seems to me that it will never be really cleaned up.
Nobody really knows why he did this.
We all want to make sense of things. Life without reason descends to chaos.
He had been shot in WWII. The shot through his jaw had taken out a big piece of his jaw, and part of his tongue. He always spoke with a thick sound to his speech because of the missing part of his tongue.
He was a very intelligent man, and never had a problem finding a job. But he never could stay with one thing. As soon as anything confrontational happened, he confronted it face forward and straight up. Usually it meant he got fired. His statement was usually “You can’t push us Smiths around.”
But I always felt a lot of it was because he felt less because of his injuries. They went a lot deeper than his thick speech.
As my cousins grew up, they moved from town to town. I remember visiting them in California, Oregon and Washington. I remember my cousin Kelly, in responding to a survey asking what was his hometown “Every city on the West Coast.”
Uncle Steve was a casualty of WWII the same as anyone who was killed at Normandy or Iwo Jima. It just took a little longer for the bullet to reach his brain.
We understand a lot more now about post-traumatic stress syndrome. Given what we know now, could it have been prevented?
No one can answer that question. Change can only be worked if a person is willing, and I am pretty sure he would have refused any help.
Still I wonder what went through his mind in those last seconds when he curled his big toe around the trigger and pushed.
He left a widow and six kids.
The damage of that instant of selfish behavior goes on and on.
I loved my Aunt Anne. I spent a lot of time at her house. She had two sons about my age, Steve and Kelly. I never got along with Steve, but Kelly and I became as close as brothers. We both had a bent towards art and humor. We went together a lot of places and had a great time together.
I was working at a hospital as an orderly when they admitted Aunt Anne into emergency with a heart attack. I knew which room she was in, so I passed in the hallway every once in a while just to hear the heart monitor beep.
Late on my shift, I went by the room, and there was no beep. I went to the front desk to ask why, and found out that she had passed away.
I had to call home to tell my mom that her sister had passed away. Not the easiest thing I have had to do, but a hard thing for a 16 year old.
Six orphans.
We tried to spread them around the family. Kelly became my brother. Various other family members took the other kids. It just didn’t work.
A man and his wife came forward and offered to adopt all of them, but only as a group. Only if they all agreed to it. The killer was that they could have no contact with our family.
I lost contact with all of them for about ten years, when Kelly and I got back together. For the next several years, we were as close as we had ever been. But things happen in life, and we are not in touch.
Kelly is one of the best scrimshaw artists in the world. He has won many awards for his work. He has supported himself with his art his whole life. His work is incredibly beautiful. And I miss his sense of humor and unique perspective.
A bullet on Normany.
A bullet in Seattle.
A tile tips, and strikes a tile, which strikes a tile.
Does it ever end?