Fam and I are visiting my 96-year-old Uncle George tonight. We love him. His complicated and somewhat meandering stories have been music to my daughter’s ears since she fell asleep in a cab at age six listening to him lament his wife’s death.

George is my late mother’s only sibling, and the only survivor of that generation, just as I am now the only survivor of my generation of my birth family. I hear my mother’s depression in Uncle George’s stories, and he sees my mother when he looks at me.

A former president of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute (NYPSI) and past medical director of the institute’s Treatment Center, he was still lecturing as recently as October of 2011, when he was a spry and supple 82. He’s a lifelong New Yorker who walks miles every day. I expected him to go on forever. But nobody does.

My cousin told me yesterday that Uncle George may have lost a step or two this year. The thought of that brought my daughter and me to tears. 

My mom died fairly young of Alzheimer’s; my dad had untreated dementia for years before my late brother (supported by the Biblical destruction by flood of Dad’s house, and the desertion of Dad’s second wife, who couldn’t take his weekly hospitalizations anymore) managed to get him into a home. He deteriorated there quickly, although he continued to dress each morning as if he were going into the office. He died believing he had beaten up Hitler in a fistfight.

My beautiful younger brother Pete passed soon afterwards, consumed by the worst kind of cancer, and not helped by having exhausted himself worrying about our father.

You never know if the next visit may be the last. 

The thought that now Uncle George too is beginning to lose his brilliant mental faculties—and maybe past beginning—is tough to take.

Our culture conspires against preparing for or even acknowledging disability, aging, and death—as if happiness is just one more Amazon delivery away. 

I got extra sleep last night and this morning to boost my emotional strength for our visit tonight. Believe it or not, this is me pumping myself up to experience love and joy in tonight’s reunion, and not let sorrow dominate. So much of living now is about finding love and connection while the systems and people we took for granted collapse around us.

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