We’re having another funeral in my family and with it the passage of the generation before mine continues.
My uncle with his puns and quirky jokes is gone. I will miss him. One of those jokes, a typical one, I remember he told me when I was little—“Hide, hide, the cow’s outside.” I took me quite awhile to get it.
Those memories of my childhood, looking up to the adults, my mother and father, my aunt and uncle; and fun, worry-free times with my brothers and all my cousins and relatives—that family has changed.
Now I am more and more the senior generation, the mature generation. I always thought of myself as middle-aged, but as Meryl Strap said to Shirley MacLaine in “Postcards from the Edge,” “How many 120-year-olds do you know?”
I called my uncle my biggest fan because when I came back here to write for the paper he would comment about how many stories I had in each issue. He called it the Judy Gibson Events.
What a privilege it is to live in a place where my family is around me, where we are together, in sickness and health, in birth and death. Just a few weeks ago I was writing here about a brand new baby who was the most recent of his great-grandchildren.
When I visited England a few years ago I remember feeling impressed with the sense of history there—how old it was, the sense of things in a continuum through many ages. America seemed young and brash in comparison.
But here in the Wisconsin Dells area many of us have a sense of history, of deep roots from ancestors who came here as immigrants generations ago. When I decided to move back here from New Mexico my friends there told me they were jealous that I actually had a “home place” to go back to. Santa Fe, like many places, has a big population of newly arrived people, many of
whom do not stay long. I also had an Ojibway friend in Minneapolis who said it is natural to heed the call to return, eventually, to where one was born.
So, as sad as this death is—the passage it marks for all of us—I treasure all the time I have had here. Although I didn’t grow up here my Dad did, my grandparents were always here, and times spent in the Dells as a child are some of my fondest memories. My uncle was a part of that.
Jan. 19, 2002