Some subjects are hard to broach, difficult to think about rationally and almost impossible to talk about. But they are out there, hidden from view like a heart beat, unnoticed until something unusual happens. When I went to a funeral two weeks ago, I looked for signs of what was obsessing me and was surely on everyone’s mind - facing death.

I attended my uncle’s funeral with several family members, including my father. I watched him closely throughout the day, knowing it would be an emotional day.

It was the funeral of the man who had married his sister. He was a great friend of my father’s, one of the men he ran with when they were young and rowdy. Now, after several strokes, Skeet was being buried in a coffin that carried with it the likeness of a white-tailed deer. Needless to say, he loved hunting more than anything.

When I was a boy, visiting my aunt and uncle took us to the country where my dad’s family lived down by the Pee Dee River in South Carolina. That was where my brothers and I got to wallow in the South that is fast disappearing, to experience the galleys of a Faulknerian novel where life revolved around meals of gargantuan proportions, wild game hunts and fishing trips, taking care of dogs, pigs, and the garden, where people took part of a living off the land and the rest from the textile mills that seemed to be everywhere. It was a place where rivers, farms, bottoms, swamps and fields were boundaries and landmarks in people’s lives. The memories may be among the richest of my childhood.
We were there to bury one of the patriarchs, a man whose reach was long and deep. He had one of the most spontaneous senses of humor I’d ever encountered. Sure there were tears and sobs at this funeral, but his spirit was not to be denied. As the family gathered and stories were recalled, there was laughter and real joy. Many of us were becoming re-acquainted, and I actually met first cousins in their late 20s and early 30s that I had never seen.

But it was my father who occupied my thoughts. He was there in his wheelchair, facing with dignity his own health problems. This was his friend, and only a year earlier he had attended the funeral of a Navy friend, and a few months before that the funeral of a man who was both a friend and brother-in-law. As his acquaintances left this earth, surely he was thinking about his own life.

And I thought about my own. Was I a good father, a good husband? Had I been a good son? Was I prepared to face the end of this life?

My father’s youngest brother is 50, the baby in a family of six children, born years after my father had escaped the tiny mill town to join the Navy and see the world. A year ago while on an annual deer hunting trip he suffered a severe heart attack. A cousin carried him out of the woods to a car. He was eventually taken to a Charlotte hospital where the doctors were frank about his ordeal: five minutes lost anywhere in that trip from the tent deep in the forest to a hospital and he would have died.

Phil was among the most gregarious at the funeral. And he was also the one who talked openly about facing death. He travels throughout the Southeast to textile mills, selling industrial sewing machine parts. His job takes him away from home, and the recent start of his own business may have contributed to this stress. At least his wife said so.

But Phil wanted to talk about cheating death, about how he now knew that family was the most important part of his life. It’s a story many have heard: a man with tubes running all in and out of his body, a near-death experience providing the catalyst for deep thoughts that invade the mind and bring deeper meaning. With the dogwood and azalea blooms painting a colorful backdrop, he invited us to visit his country home, to take a week off work in November and join him and other relatives on the annual black powder deer hunt, to plan a family reunion at my father’s house so he could bring his wife, his daughters and his grandchildren. Family, he repeated, is what I’ve come to appreciate.

As my father left to drive home, the eldest of the clan, all the male brothers, cousins and nephews followed him out to his van where they lingered at the edge of the yard bidding their farewells. I stood back a bit from the crowd, watching, a proud son viewing his father through a different lens, as the oldest brother, the only one who left home to find his own way in the world, the one the others looked up to.

I didn’t discover any answers during that short trip. I did, however, uncover some truths that I can carry with me, perhaps making the future a little easier to understand.

(Scott McLeod can be reached at info@smokymountainnews.com)

 

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