A Farewell to My Uncle Ralph

So... my cousin Becky texted me just after 5:00 this morning to tell me that my Uncle Ralph passed away.

Apparently he died sometime yesterday; but my Aunt Joan had to call and beg the Tucson police three times before they finally sent someone out to perform a wellness check.

I had not had any contact with Ralph since circa 2007—and the meaningful dimensions of the relationship I'd once had with him had largely unraveled a decade before that (for reasons I'd already anticipated touching on in the next month or so, since Becky and I recently got back in touch).

But he was still my dad's little brother and a significant presence throughout my childhood; so, I wanted to take a few minutes to share some of my memories.

I'm at the mercy of the limited number of photographs I have available to me on my computer: I'm sure we have hundreds more somewhere in my parents' basement... But I don't have the time or the patience to organize and digitize all of those right now; and so I'm going to work with what I have on hand.

Here's three-year-old Ralph with my Aunt Joan, my dad, and my Aunt Jill back in 1966...

My paternal grandmother was an absolute psycho—in a colloquial sense for sure, and probably a clinical sense as well—so, my dad and his sisters had some pretty rough times growing up.

Ralph came along pretty late: There was a 12-year spread between him and my dad, and about a decade between him and Jill. I guess my grandmother must have been jaded with raising terrorizing her kids by that point... because, as Ralph used to recount to my mom, "When someone tells you 'I don't care' enough, you start to believe them."

(To her credit, my Aunt Joan was largely responsible for his upbringing in the absence of meaningful attention from their mother.)

Fast-forward to 1982, when my parents got married. Here's Ralph at 19 as his big brother's best man—with my cousin Laura as the flower girl...

Fast-forward again to 1989. Here's Ralph with his soon-to-be first wife Brenda...

A year and a half later, Brenda was battling breast cancer and a dismal prognosis; so they got married in her hospital room! And I was the ringbearer :)

Brenda died not long after that. And, even as a six-year-old kid at the time, I felt like it was a noble (and heavy) thing for my uncle to have married a woman even as they both knew that her death was imminent.

It wasn't until many years later that I realized the temporal proximity of Brenda's death by cancer to my father's leukemia diagnosis:

For me, I was six for the first and seven for the second—and the space between two birthdays at that age felt like the equivalent of a decade. But I imagine that, for Ralph, it likely came as a sucker-punch just as he had made peace with his wife's passing...

Hey! Guess what, Slugger? Your brother has leukemia now!

...Oh, and you're an ideal candidate to donate bone marrow; so buckle up!

But these were the years when Ralph went from being "my uncle whom I see a handful of times a year because he lives two hours away out in Gettysburg" to "my uncle whom I get to see just about every weekend."

Between 1992 and my dad's death in 1995, Ralph spent a ton of time with me, Kelly, and our mom at our old house. Most weeks, he would arrive right from work on Friday evening, crash on our downstairs couch for the weekend, and then head back home on Sunday afternoon.

And despite not being a "kid person," he fumbled his way through it pretty well when my mom would leave him with me and Kelly while she went to be with our dad in the hospital.

Shortly after our dad's initial diagnosis, Ralph and his friend Russ built me and Kelly a swingset from scratch.

At that age, I was absolutely blown away by the fact that my uncle and his friend could just show up with a bunch of wood and somehow turn it into an actual swingset like they were God-damned MacGyver or something.

And Kelly and I got many, many, many hours of joy out of that thing...

Somewhere around this time was also when Uncle Ralph took me (just me) to Devil's Den:

This would've been sometime between 1992 and 1996—long before everyone walked around with a camera in his pocket 24/7. And we were just two dudes out for an adventure; so we didn't stop to take pictures or smell the roses... but now, neither my mom nor I can remember exactly when that trip would have been.

But, I remember that Ralph and I got in his car... and all he would tell me was that he were going to "Devil's Den"—but he refused to elaborate on what that was.

I spent the whole car-ride (probably 15 minutes, which at that age feels like four hours) trying to get more information out of him. But Ralph wouldn't give me anything.

We stopped along the way at some kind of pub or tavern or something to grab an early dinner...

...but I was more than old enough to read, and it wasn't called "Devil's Den".

And also, they had a jukebox over on the far wall. So, after the waitress took our order, Ralph gave me a quarter so I could go pick a song.

But, of course, I quickly discovered that I didn't recognize any of the artists, or albums, or tracks available... so I had to switch into "Instinct Mode" and pick something entirely by feel (also known as judging a book by its cover—or a song by its name, as it were).

I had no idea who "Brooks & Dunn" were; but man, did I feel a promising vibe when I saw a song called "We'll Burn That Bridge."

My little-kid imagination dutifully conjured up an image of a rickety old bridge with a bunch of TNT barrels crammed underneath it, and a few dudes on motorcycles shredding their electric guitars while the thing exploded into a glorious firestorm that would be visible from like Saturn or maybe even the Kuiper belt.

Oh, I just knew it was going to be legendary.

I slid in the quarter...

Then I carefully keyed in the coded coordinates for the album number and the track selection—so focused that I may as well have been entering missile-launch codes at NORAD...

And finally I began the proud walk back across the restaurant to return to our table.

It was about to get awesome in here.

But... it wasn't awesome.

Instead of the Metallica sound I had been so sure was about to ensue, the jukebox started playing some wimpy-ass "farm emo" song instead—complete with some middle-aged-sounding hick crooning the most boring lyrics with the most obnoxious Texas twang I'd ever heard.

And, Ralph being Ralph, he was cracking up as I got back to our table, and he made it his mission for the rest of the day (and pretty much the next three years) to torment me about it every 30 seconds or so:

Hey... we'll burn that bridge when we git dare.

But when we finally got to the actual Devil's Den, I was ecstatic to find an open field full of glacial residue, with boulders the size of Ralph's car and beyond.

It was, hands down, the most incredible place I had ever been (though I made sure to say that quietly enough in my mind that my memories of Playwicki Park wouldn't overhear it and be jealous).

Meanwhile, Ralph did readily donate his bone marrow—subjecting himself to immense physical pain in the process—in the hopes of saving his brother.

My dad ultimately succumbed to his cancer—which I'm sure must have been a whirlwind of agony for Ralph, between the physical pain he had endured, and the emotional pain of losing a loved one (to say nothing of whatever guilt his brain would have hoodwinked him into feeling, being the only donor but then having the transplant not be enough), and of course the proximity of it all to his still having just semi-recently lost Brenda to cancer as well...

And what was Ralph's "reward" for all that pain and suffering? Well, not even an hour after my dad's death, we were all sitting in a lounge in the hospital, and my paternal grandmother (Ralph's mother) pulled me in for a hug and told me, "You're the only man I have left now"... as her other still-living son sat across the room, not 15 feet away from her.

Ralph was a few weeks away from his 32^nd birthday when my dad died, and it's sad to look back on everything he had been through by then and have to conclude that those three decades were, in many ways, the happier half of his life.

But, a year later in 1996, he shacked up with the woman who would eventually become his second wife... and who, later still, would go on to become his ex-wife—and leave him broken and penniless when she did.

Those details are best left to a future post; but suffice it to say that she was the catalyst that sabotaged the wonderful relationship and the unique closeness that my mom, my sister, and I had all enjoyed with Ralph for several years running at that point.

She got her claws into him quickly and deeply, and had commandeered his entire life in no time at all.

So, things between us were strained by 1997—and irrevocably so by 1999, when he asked me to be his ringbearer again and I just had to stare at him in disbelief...

Buddy, are you dense? You've largely ignored me and Kelly for the better part of two years at this point.

P.S. I can barely tolerate being in the same room as your excruciating little bride-to-be; so, I don't even want to attend the wedding as a guest, let alone endorse it as an active participant.

So, I declined.

And that was about it until a one-time meeting in 2007, when Kelly and I met him for lunch in a last-ditch effort to rekindle some semblance of the relationship we had shared 15 years before.

But it was too far gone.

And that's how my once-favorite uncle fell out of my life forever.

That took me a long time—decades—to forgive.

But I've found its underpinnings increasingly tricky to judge as life has continued to widen my distance to that point in time.

When the past was still the present and I was living all of it for the first time—viewing reality entirely through the purely emotional lens of a teenager—the separation felt like nothing short of a betrayal on Ralph's part...

He was "the grownup." (Kelly and I were 9 and 11 when things first began to unravel.)

He was the one who had allowed his situation to alter our relationship.

And, the knowledge that he hadn't done this out of voluntary malice, but merely out of... spineless apathy (for lack of a better word) was of little comfort when the net result was identical: Regardless of how it happened, Ralph let Wife #2 destroy everything we had held sacred.

That stung. Bigtime.

And it stung almost as much in 2007 when Kelly and I had the chance to sit down with him face-to-face as young adults (rather than as meek and unempowered children) to air our frustration over it... only to have him double down and deny any culpability whatsoever in the matter (out of spineless apathy again, or out of blind naïveté, I'm not sure).

But that was really it then...

We'd tried.

We'd failed.

And in many ways, I mourned the loss of my Uncle Ralph nearly two decades ago.

By 2011, Wife #2 had of course lain the groundwork to bleed him dry: She maxed out his credit cards, sucked every last cent from his retirement accounts, robbed him blind in the divorce, and left him to go down with a sinking ship as she shacked up with her next mark to do it all over again.

That old Maya Angelou quote came to mind...

When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.

...because God knows that my mother had warned Ralph countless times about this demon of a woman 25 years prior when he first became enamored with her.

Over the 14 years since, my opinion on the matter has essentially been, "He has my pity but not my sympathy."

Taking pity on someone who has lost everything is easy. Sympathizing with him, when you feel that he brought it on himself, is more difficult.

And so, it's not until very recently—in these last three weeks or so, as I've unpacked all of this turmoil again as a result of my cousin Becky reaching out to me earlier in the month—that my feelings have softened.

Not a lot, but a little bit.

Yes, Ralph's apathy and indecisiveness were his own fault: His choice to sit back and let Wife #2 make his decisions for him was very much a choice in and of itself; and I can, and do, still judge him for that accordingly.

But, at the same time, I've recently come to realize that looking over the first half of his life with the degree of objectivity permitted by my emotional distance from him at this point in my life, has allowed me to temper my judgment with a modicum of sympathy:

To imagine his personality developing in the shadow of a neglectful (and arguably downright evil) mother, and then to use that reality to inform my reevaluation of what it must have been like to grow up in that sort of environment, or to marry a woman on her deathbed, or to lose a brother at far too young an age... it provides a helpful context I've never had before.

And, even though I disagree with a lot of his decisions (or indecisions), I can at least understand for the first time—and even appreciate, in some cases—why he went down some of the paths he did...

He just wanted happiness, like everybody else does. Something safe. Something secure. Someone warm and permanent and real. It's unfortunate that every time he thought he'd found it, it didn't seem fated to last.

And, with that, I can absolutely sympathize.

And so, Uncle Ralph, as I sit here all but certain that you and I never would have had another dialogue in this lifetime even on an infinite timeline, I forgive you, and I miss you, and I hope that—if there is anything after death—you're at peace and have found your happiness in a better place.

This is the most recent picture of Ralph I had in my possession—from my grandfather's 80^th birthday party in 2003...

But I asked my mom if she had anything more recent, and she sent me two from Aunt Jill over the years: First, this one from my cousin Becky's wedding in 2011...

...and second, this one from Jill and Joan's visit to Arizona in 2019...

And finally, this is the picture that was used for Ralph's obituary in the Gettysburg Times...

I have no idea when this one's from... but the Ralph I remember is from midway between this guy and the 1989 Mullet Man :)