Jerry
Thursday, May 11, 2006
My godfather, better known to me as Uncle Jerry, passed away yesterday morning. It’s so strange and sad to think of things without him. I haven’t yet sorted out my thoughts.
Jerry was my father’s best friend and mentor, and our families have a shared history that I cherish now that I’m no longer living at home in a way I couldn’t as a teenager. We spent Christmas together every year; when his oldest daughter got married (years ago; Jerry’s youngest is roughly 10 years older than me) it was as if someone in our family was getting married. Whenever I went home, we saw Jerry and his family. They’re as much a part of California to me as anything else.
Jerry gave me books every year for Christmas and my birthday, and though at the time I’m sure I didn’t appreciate them, they were a large reason I became a lover of books. Now that I work in book publishing, I look back I can see that line, that connection back to Jerry and those copies of Madeleine L’Engle books that he and his wife gave me when I was 8.
He loved to sail. He had a boat he kept in Marina Del Rey, a small Catalina with a tiller, and I’ll always think of him on the boat, hat on his head, hand firmly on the tiller, racing whoever was nearby out of the harbor or past that next buoy.
My mom and I were talking today about him, and how over the past several months he hadn’t been lucid, really. He retired about a year and a half ago, and then had surgery on his foot that rapidly aged him for reasons we don’t understand. You would swear he’d had either a stroke or Alzheimers, yet the only two things the doctors seemed to be able to rule out were those two conditions. I think we all believed that with more tests, they’d discover the problem and right whatever was wrong. We truly thought they’d discover his potassium levels were off and prescribe vitamins and he’d be back, or something equally simple—Jerry was brilliant, and witty, and sweet, and generous, and so quickly not present that it had to be something utterly simple and fixable. It wasn’t anything big—no tumor, no neurological disorder, no disease for which he had the telltale signs and symptoms—that it somehow logically followed that whatever it was, was a simple matter of chemical or mineral balance.
My mom was telling me that he had rallied for a bit over the past week—he went for a walk with his walker, something he hadn’t done in months; he said “thank you for taking care of me” to his wife on their way back from a doctor’s appointment a few days ago. And he had this conversation with his youngest daughter, who got engaged about a month ago to a man named Seth. They were sitting in the house, and she was gauging his memory.
“Who am I?”
“Jill.”
“And what will my new name be?”
“Seth.”
And then he looked her in the eye, smiled, and put his hand over her left hand and engagement ring.
Jerry was my father’s best friend and mentor, and our families have a shared history that I cherish now that I’m no longer living at home in a way I couldn’t as a teenager. We spent Christmas together every year; when his oldest daughter got married (years ago; Jerry’s youngest is roughly 10 years older than me) it was as if someone in our family was getting married. Whenever I went home, we saw Jerry and his family. They’re as much a part of California to me as anything else.
Jerry gave me books every year for Christmas and my birthday, and though at the time I’m sure I didn’t appreciate them, they were a large reason I became a lover of books. Now that I work in book publishing, I look back I can see that line, that connection back to Jerry and those copies of Madeleine L’Engle books that he and his wife gave me when I was 8.
He loved to sail. He had a boat he kept in Marina Del Rey, a small Catalina with a tiller, and I’ll always think of him on the boat, hat on his head, hand firmly on the tiller, racing whoever was nearby out of the harbor or past that next buoy.
My mom and I were talking today about him, and how over the past several months he hadn’t been lucid, really. He retired about a year and a half ago, and then had surgery on his foot that rapidly aged him for reasons we don’t understand. You would swear he’d had either a stroke or Alzheimers, yet the only two things the doctors seemed to be able to rule out were those two conditions. I think we all believed that with more tests, they’d discover the problem and right whatever was wrong. We truly thought they’d discover his potassium levels were off and prescribe vitamins and he’d be back, or something equally simple—Jerry was brilliant, and witty, and sweet, and generous, and so quickly not present that it had to be something utterly simple and fixable. It wasn’t anything big—no tumor, no neurological disorder, no disease for which he had the telltale signs and symptoms—that it somehow logically followed that whatever it was, was a simple matter of chemical or mineral balance.
My mom was telling me that he had rallied for a bit over the past week—he went for a walk with his walker, something he hadn’t done in months; he said “thank you for taking care of me” to his wife on their way back from a doctor’s appointment a few days ago. And he had this conversation with his youngest daughter, who got engaged about a month ago to a man named Seth. They were sitting in the house, and she was gauging his memory.
“Who am I?”
“Jill.”
“And what will my new name be?”
“Seth.”
And then he looked her in the eye, smiled, and put his hand over her left hand and engagement ring.
This entry was posted
on Thursday, May 11, 2006 at 7:28 PM.
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