Steven Clark, my uncle
So I feel like if I don’t post about my uncle passing away tonight it’ll be like a missed chance. I’m sort of having mixed emotions about his passing. I’ve lost a lot… geesh… a lot of people in my life. But most of those people were so close to me in a way that my uncle never was. He was always just Uncle Steve, always there.
Maybe I should explain a bit. When Steve was growing up he was completely normal. He has girlfriends. He dated, drove cars, joked with friends and my dad. He was my father’s older brother. Then he went into the Navy where his job was to paint the planes and other shit that needed to be painted. This was also way back when it wasn’t known that being around paint and all those toxic fumes were bad for a person. Well, it sure affected him. He went into a psych home. He was discharged for mental reasons. When my parents started running the mental home in Idaho Steve came there to live. By that time he wasn’t really a normal guy. He was function-able, sure. He was given a daily allowance which he’d use to go to the gas station every day to buy Coke or coffee and his cigarettes. His medication, to me anyway, seemed to make him an even more awkward individual. It gave him all these tics. The mechanical way he’d smoke, take a drink, smoke, take a drink, smoke, take a drink… that’s really all he did all day. Pick up the cigarette take a puff, pick up the Coke take a drink, pick up the cigarette take a puff, pick up the Coke take a drink… always always always letting the cigarette or can just barely touch the ashtray or table before it was picked up again. This was Steve. This is how I’d always known my uncle. As a child I would make a perfect impression of him doing these things to make my friends laugh. It’s horrible to admit, but it’s also how I coped with things, making them into funny things to tell later. Years later my other Uncle Dana (my mother’s brother) lived on our property when we moved out of town and he watched over my Uncle Steve. They’ve lived there together for many years now.
Tonight, my Uncle Dana was making dinner and he thought Steve was getting ready and went to go check on him. He was unresponsive so he called my dad at the main house. They called my mother (a nurse) and on her way out to the house she called me to tell me that she thought my Uncle Steve was dead. Dana and my father had called an ambulance with hopes that he was still able to be revived. But my mother got there first and knew right away that he was gone and there was nothing to be done. She looked around his room and bathroom and noticed that he’d obviously been throwing up straight blood (meaning he had internal bleeding that had been going on for awhile). He must have been suffering for awhile without telling anyone. Which seems about right because you see - my Uncle Steve NEVER talked. Only sometimes you could get an awkwardly loud, “YES” or “NO”, but really nothing.
The only time I remember hearing of Steve actually speaking more than that was when he had found Ron’s body at the bottom of our staircase. Ron was my dad’s best friend from the Navy days, who had been staying with us for awhile and was a severe alcoholic. He had been having seizures pretty regularly if he didn’t have alcohol in his system. (One time I had to get him from the hospital and as I was bringing him out he had a Grand Mal seizure right in front of me which knocked me on my ass.) Well, Ron had another Grand Mal seizure at the top of our stairs and fell all the way down breaking his neck in the process. Steve found him and actually called my grandfather cause no one was home saying simply, “Ron is not moving.”
My Uncle Steve scarred the crap out of me and enthralled me at the same time. He was a very foreboding figure and quick and sharp with his movements. His not speaking (or rather when he did) was even more intimidating. But I would watch him for hours as a child wondering about his mind and how our brains could make us do the things his brain was making him do. I never had a close relationship with him, not many people really did. But he still was my Uncle Steve, and he was always there, and now he’s not, and he will be a missed presence for sure.
