My great-uncle just died.
They had been about to fit him with a pacemaker, I guess he never made it that long.
He was one of the few people in the extended family that I always got along with. We didn't ever talk much, but we didn't really have to. I hung out with the animals who always hung out around him, and that was usually enough. (He gave food and medical care to any animal that needed it, so there were always an assortment of dogs and cats, at minimum, hanging around.)
That whole situation reminds me of Mary Margaret's poem, "Wild Kittens":
I see big cats race across the yard as my grandma talks in cat talk.
Cat talk sounds like this: Here kitty, kitty.
In cat talk, here kitty kitty means I love you.
I don’t see any wild kittens but I know they are there.
My boy told me so and my boy doesn’t lie about important things like kittens.
I am tired of sitting on the steps, so I hide under the house and sit in the cool black dirt.
I am a wild kitten.
My grandma can’t see me, but she knows that I am here.
The last time I saw Lindy, someone took a picture of us together that was really funny because we had the same haircut and very similar clothes, so we looked very alike. I had one of his cats on my lap, who was recovering from eye surgery so she had a plastic cone on her neck. His window was full of shelves and shelves of glass... What are those things called? Knickknacks? Tchotchkes? Something like that, and they all looked like a glittering rainbow when the sun shined through them.
But most of all I remember that he never turned away anyone who needed anything, whether they were human or animal. My mom said if someone didn't have shoes, he'd get them shoes, and he was the same way with animals, both wild and tame.
He was part of the Swedish-American branch of our family, both of his parents were Swedish. I actually knew his mother, she lived so long. She came over from Sweden on her own around the age of twelve, worked as a maid, then raised seven or eight kids during the Depression. She was as generous as he was, and I can't think of anyone more quintessentially Hufflepuff than she was. Not that this should be mistaken for weakness, both of them were very strong people. They just considered love and generosity to be the most important things they could show other people, whether they had a lot themselves or not (and mostly they didn't).
He lived with his mother and helped take care of her until she died when he was in his seventies (I think that's how old he was), making it so that she avoided a nursing home until right near the end, when she could've ended up in one decades sooner. He himself didn't have anyone to take care of him as he got older, and a relative I won't even name in a post like this one, ensured that he ended up in a nursing home away from his animals because of some problems that could've easily been dealt with at home. (The relative in question is the only person in our family with money, so even if he himself didn't want to look out for him, he could've hired someone. This pissed off a lot of family who were much more powerless to do anything about these decisions -- we were all brought up to value family more than that, and he had been one of our main examples of how that could work.)
I guess I knew he was going to die soon, and I knew I'd never see him again in person. But I always felt more connected to him than to most of my distant relatives, and I wish we'd had the opportunity to spend more time together. As a kid, when I'd visit him and my great-grandma, he always let me hang out in the backyard with his cats. Where by 'backyard' I mean a non-fenced-in portion of the hillside behind their very small house.
So R.I.P. Uncle Lindy, I love you. If there's any sort of afterlife, I hope you're with all your cats and dogs now, and your parents.
