Saying good-bye, all over again

As I type this, I am sitting in a black limousine on the way to Jacksonville, Florida to bury a man who was like a second father to me. (You may have read about losing him in my recent post, Take That Flight.) My cousins, my aunt and my cousin’s husband flank me, and this seems like a womb of some sort after a very emotional funeral service throughout which I cried with a fervor I haven’t experienced ages.

During the service, my big brother who had lived with my Uncle–Dean Willoughby–for several years as he finished college, read an eloquent letter in front of a packed funeral home. My brother described the impact that our “Unc” had on his life and it shook me to the core; my brother loved him as a father. Since our own father died when I was fifteen and he was twenty, Unc sorta stepped in and took over the role as much as he could.

As I stood next to Unc’s body in the casket I remembered vividly what Unc had said to me twenty-two years ago as he and I stood next to my own father’s dead body.

“That’s not really him, Katie, it’s just a shell.”

He probably never imagined how indelibly those words etched into my mind, the comfort brought to me as they were uttered. I told my cousin Terri, Unc’s daughter, about what Unc had told me that day.

She smiled and simply said “thank you for sharing that with me, it helps.” And it was like bidding farewell a second time, yet this time to a man who was able to live well past the age of fifty and who had the good fortune of seeing his children become parents.

I imagined these two men coming face-to-face, embracing once again, Johnny Cash playing in the background, and it made me smile.