Misplacing Sadness

Yesterday morning I volunteered to drive my cousin upstate, a spur of the moment thing. To get my head in a place where I could keep my car on the road, I physically swallowed down about a gallon of fresh grief.

You see, earlier on Sunday, I got a call from my mother. My uncle, who was in the hospital from the previous week fighting off an infection, had taken a turn for the worse, and the hospital was asking for his family to come as soon as they could. Just 20 minutes later, my mother called again. My uncle had passed after being diagnosed in July.

I pushed this down to make the two-hour drive north, and found that I was numb for the remainder of the day, with just flashes of sadness.

Uncle Ed had been really living up to those clichéd “Retired and Loving It!” t-shirts you see on so many septuagenarians these days. He had a time share in Florida, he went white water rafting, and he played tennis with the kind of alacrity that would wear down Federer. (That's Ed in 2003 in India celebrating after one of his three sons were married in a Sikh wedding ceremony. Yes, we all wore pink turbins, and no, you can't see a picture of me in one.)

Before Sunday, the last I saw Uncle Ed was in June, just a few days after I returned from Tahoe. Just a month later, he went into the hospital for chest pains and his tests found that his heart was fine, but his blood tests found something else. It was a leukemia that went by the acronym AML and it’s a kind not easy to beat, especially if you’re older.

But Uncle Ed was one of the toughest guys I knew. He was in the Navy; he was a career NYPD Detective. But more than anything else: He helped raise six kids.

He was just slightly larger than life, a five-foot-ten colossus. An everyman hero. A gentle bear of a man. A generous man, a gregarious man, a man devoted to his church and family, with an army of friends.

And there seemed to be hope. Just a few weeks ago, Ed was found to be in remission, and we all hoped it would hold long enough to consider a bone marrow transplant. Then Ed would once again be the one with the firmest handshake at the family party, giving you the kind of hug that came close to cracking ribs. Back to his old self, back to being “Big Ed.”

But we didn’t understand how virulent AML really was, and perhaps we didn’t want to know. The combination of the disease and the chemotherapy to treat the disease and the antibiotics to fight the infection and the infection combined to wash away the ruddiness in his cheeks and sap his strength.

And now the world is a less kind and wonderful place without him with us. Today, I’ve found that sadness that I pushed down the day before.

I’ve ridden more than 1,000 miles on that backache-inducing Canondale, and I’ll ride a million more with your help if I can help just one family to keep loved ones like Uncle Ed around to give bear hugs and bristle-mustached kisses on the cheeks of their nieces and nephews.