Thinking after visit to Uncle Gene

Ann, Gene's niece,  wrote this after her visit in August.  She had intended to send it as a comment, but when she sent it recently it seemed much more appropriate as it's own post.


August 9, 2009  Flight from Nashville to Denver

Ann VanSant

            I am very grateful for being able to see Uncle Gene. Sue and Ken picked me up in Nashville and we all went together to Chattanooga. (While we were there, we also met the Rudolphs’ granddaughter and visited with Margery and her grandson—it felt a little like a return to Mt. Victory.)

            Uncle Gene’s face was clean shaven but his white/gray beard was still visible below the chin line.  His face is thin but even with the tracheotomy (and the neck brace that he had on on Friday night when we got there)—creating all that busy-ness about his head and neck—he is still Uncle Gene.  He is very tired, but he is still really present.  I am touched by how much he is still himself even in these circumstances.  He speaks with his lips but also almost with a whisper.  It’s not hard to understand what he is saying.  I told him Friday night when we first went for a visit that I would tell him “Uncle Gene” stories the next visit, stories that would make him smile.  And he smiled at that, smiled in a way that was completely Uncle Gene.

            At one point when Aunt Emily was massaging his hands, she touched the tracheotomy tube structure, and he said, “Be careful.”  She asked him then if he needed to have  suctioning to clear his airways and then got a nurse to do it.  She is calmly, consistently vigilant for him.  She is, I think, talented at being both gentle and insistent.  And he is alert to the fragility of his life because his body is giving him so little cooperation right now.

            This visit lets me better picture him as I read Lynn’s remarkable blog.  I know the angle of his bed and where the window is and where the gloving, masking, and gowning take place before a visit. I can imagine Joyce and Frances and Bob visiting him, and Russell, and Steve, and Lynn. I can imagine the family’s lifting the babies up outside his window so he could see them.  And I can imagine little Elijah bringing him the brightness of a little boy’s life.

            We spent the night at Aunt Emily’s and had her wonderful corn and the tomatoes. And Lynn came over and Lynn and Alan for breakfast.  We had lots of talking time.  In the evening Emily showed us a sort of yearbook of Grandma’s college. There was a strange story, a mystery, very veiled, as part of the history of the freshman class. Sue found the details in an old newspaper online.  And we talked about family stories, about Mt. Victory & Hyden, Russell and Lynn and Steve and our childhood days, and about how important Uncle Gene was to us.  He used to worry my brain over and over by asking, “How do you know you’re you and not Nancy Sue?” It was too much for my small mind, and Uncle Gene would half laugh/half chuckle. (As I told Uncle Gene, I later knew that the answer was “Because God knows,” but I didn’t know it then.) For Sue and me, Uncle Gene is part of the framework of things.  I slept in the Uncle Gene room at their house and dreamed about him.

            I told him on Saturday that Hannah was sorry not to have been able to come.  And he said, “Tell Hannah I love her.”  That is a gift for me to take back to Hannah.  He means a lot to her.  He was so important to me and now he is so important to her.  I am grateful that Hannah and I could see him twice in short succession last summer, listening to him tell his own Uncle Gene stories.

Love, Ann