My uncle Mike, my dad's brother, died earlier today. He was 90. My mom got the news from my Aunt Suzanne, the youngest of the four Lanin siblings and now the only one alive. Over the past ten months, Aunt Suzanne has now seen all three of her siblings and her husband die. I cannot but try to imagine what she's feeling. In addition to her grief, which is surely beyond my comprehension, I imagine she feels a great deal of loneliness, and a particular fear, too--how would you not find yourself thinking, "When is my turn?"

And what do I think and what do I feel? I tried to puzzle it out this morning. I was and am not particularly close with my dad's side of the family. I went to college in CT, where a substantial part of that side of the family lives/lived, and saw none of them more than twice, I don't think. I visited my Aunt Suzanne and Uncle Saul a couple of times in college and not at all during my six-year stint there before I moved to Colorado. Just before we moved, we found that my cousin Chrissie, Mike's daughter, lived literally up the road from us. She and I visited once or twice before I moved away. I hadn't seen Betty Ann since I was a kid, when a couple of summers we went to Atlantic City to visit. And both during college and during my later stint, I would meet with Mike from time to time when I went down to New York.

And yet I do feel a connection with my dad's family. I don't know if this connection is an act of imagination--a wholesale creation--or something real. (Does it matter? Is there even a difference?) So I am thinking and feeling today about what it means to lose someone to whom I wasn't close. Because I recall the times that Mike and I did spend together--visiting him in his office, the time Debby and I came down to New York to hear Yvonne do a cabaret performance, the visit to Mike when he was in the hospital--this last was just before we left for Colorado, and I was pretty sure it'd be the last time I saw him. But I went back to the east coast in the summer of 2009 and he and I had lunch together at restaurant near his and Yvonne's apartment. I remember as I left watching him cross the street in bright sunshine, an old man in New York, and wondering if I'd see him again.

There's a way that the past exist in your elders. Am I the only one who feels this? I know the Buddhists say that only the present exists but … it's like we all live as a timeline of ourselves, so that we are not a point but a length. I imagine us as these black lines against a white background. The lines stretch in both directions from the present, toward past and future. As they extend further from the present toward times distant, they fade, blur, lose intensity. And I see the lines of those around me. The closer a person is to me, the more solidly I see their line. As that person's distance from me increases, be that distance temporal or emotional, the blurrier their line becomes. And so the full imagining of myself in time is not a point nor even my own line but as kind of a cloud, which becomes fainter as the edges are approached and then fades away. At a death, one of the lines that makes up a part of the cloud ceases to be.

My recollection of that last time I saw Mike must be partly faulty, because when I first brought up the memory, I saw him crossing Sutton Pl. from West to East. But that doesn't make sense if he was returning home--their apartment is on the west side of the street.

There is something interesting about the faultiness of memory, isn't there? We can know something happened and feel something about the way it happened--isn't that kind of what memory is--and yet when I first brought up the image I must have had it wrong. Perhaps I was conflating when we crossed Sutton Pl. together to go to the little pocket park he took me to. It was July in New York City and sunny and hot. The connection between Mike and me, manifest in the events of that day and my recollections of them, was already blurring off toward the edges of the cloud. Today it is a little blurrier. I miss him.