Last Wednesday, my uncle had a heart attack — and not the mild soft-focus slo-mo Bayer commercial kind where everyone’s standing around wearing chambray shirts and looking tragic and well-coiffed in the driveway as the basketball rolls to the edge of the lawn, the game of Horse abandoned until happier times, either. No, he had the big, bad, blocked artery kind. The charging to 300…clear kind. The kind that prompts declarations like “I’ve had a good life” and “if it’s my time, it’s my time” and “I saw a beautiful white light and started walking towards it and blah blah blah.”

My father and his brothers don’t give white lights and blah blah blah much of a welcome, though, as a rule, so if Uncle J saw any special effects, he isn’t letting on. He doesn’t remember much, he says. He felt kind of crappy that morning, blew off lunch with his friends and headed home, started feeling heart-attacky in the car, called my cousin Little J, called EMS, got to the house, and lay down, and that’s the last thing he recalls before the hospital. His heart stopped three times before he got there, but he doesn’t remember that part. Just as well, probably. Besides, Little J got there right after the paramedics did and I imagine she’ll remember it long enough for both of them.

I’ll remember it too, and I didn’t even see it. Back east, I spent the day worrying and talking to various cousins and deciding whether to join my dad out there. Eventually I made up my mind to rent a car and go, because I wanted to see Uncle J for myself and inform him in a “ha ha…okay, no, seriously” tone that if he died on me, I’d kill him, but also because I wanted to see my dad. I’d just seen my dad the day before, and he looked fine — his usual graying, hardy self. But the younger, shorter, redder-haired version of my dad had nearly died, and I kept thinking about what Little J must have seen from the bedroom door, how terrifying and wrong it must have seemed, how much I would have had left to say if I’d come home to my own father helpless on the floor with no shirt on and time running out, questions I forgot to ask, bits of history I didn’t learn, things I’d thought but never said, a whole planet receding while I watched from space where there’s no air.

I thought I’d feel better if I could keep an eye on both of them for a day or two — ask a few of those questions, learn a little of the history, think out loud that I want them to live. No, don’t get up. I’ll get my own drink. The couch is fine for sleeping. All you have to do is show up. Wait until I get there. Just…live. Live a little longer. Don’t go anywhere.

But we’re not a family given to displays of traditional sentiment. The verb “to croak” is used to describe the demises of even the most beloved relatives. A hospital stay is greeted with a grouchily cynical calculation of the per-minute cost, followed by a muttered, rueful “ka-ching” every time a nurse enters the room to take a blood pressure reading. “You jerk” is an expression of fondness. Uncle J himself, responding to the remark that the hospital seemed very good, summed up not only his experience there but also our clan’s ruling philosophy when he remarked that lunch got served on time, but he’d like some pants. Like, yeah, I had a near-death experience, and to tell you the truth it’s a little breezy around here, but hey, the food’s not bad. Typical of a Bunting, really.

I can see that point of view — the “if it gets too squishy, we’ll all sink” perspective. After all, it’s important to love and value people and to tell them that and to hope they don’t die before you see them next, but I can’t focus my mind on that stuff all the time either, like a magnifying glass on an ant, or my mind would burst into flame just like the ant would. I especially can’t focus on that stuff during a blowing rainstorm on Interstate 80 when my rented Corolla has the crappiest wiper blades in the National Rental Car fleet and I’ve got eighteen-wheelers thundering past me on the left, nearly capsizing me in their wakes. No, in that case my mind has to concentrate on retrieving the file marked When The Driver’s Ed Lady Talked About Hydroplaning, I Passed Notes With Gigi Instead Of Listening, Because They’d Obviously Fabricated The Entire Concept Of Hydroplaning In Order To Scare Teens, Like, It Is A Car And Therefore Clearly Cannot Just Float Along On A Puddle, Like, How Stupid Do They Think We Are, Anyway from the archives and seeing if maybe there’s a little slip of paper in the folder that says “tap brakes lightly” which meant that I skimmed over the hydroplaning section in the manual, but the little piece of paper probably says, “Tap brakes…lightly? That sounds right. Right? I don’t know — you could try it. We’ve got an airbag, right?” and as I grip the wheel in terror and contemplate giving the brakes an inoffensive little tap, I tell myself that the universe wouldn’t do that to my father, wouldn’t run me off the road and kill me and give my uncle another heart attack and force my father to shuttle back and forth between two funerals all, “I can wear this tie to both, right?” and then I think of that scene in Goodfellas where Mickey Conway is saying that Jeanie has a husband and a son in jail and a mother in the funeral parlor, and Scorsese cuts to Karen bulging her eyes and touching her hairdo like she actually wants to see if her head’s still there. I can only think deep thoughts for so long before I need to come up for air.

I pull off the road for a bathroom break, and for a minute I just sit in the stall in the Mobil station and rest my eyes from straining through the rain. I lean my forehead against the door, even though it’s totally unsanitary to do so, and I listen to conversations out in the Mobil Mart where nobody else’s uncle needed shock paddles yesterday. I keep doing it all day, eavesdropping on various conversations in various bathrooms, little snack-sized conversations, lazy badminton-y conversations. It’s one of my favorite pastimes — imagining a whole life out of just a snippet of talk and the shoes I see under the doors of the stall.

“Over seventy it starts shaking.” (Nothing wrong with the car, but the shaking scares her, and she can’t afford to run a full diagnostic on it because she has a loan payment coming up. Red moccasins.) “I was hungry before, but now I’m not hungry, except that soon I’ll be so hungry that I’m not hungry again, so I guess I should eat while I’m only not hungry.” (Or she could just not bother — her mom’s going to make a big dinner anyway and they eat early. Blue and silver sneakers.) “I thought the stripes looked better, but she said it didn’t go with the sofa.” (The stripes really did look better, but of course she can’t say anything about it and expect the daughter-in-law to listen, and she don’t know why Danny doesn’t just tell his wife he doesn’t like his food so salty, for heaven’s sake! Easy Spirit walkers, beige.) I wonder what life an eavesdropper would build in her head for me if I walked by, talking about Uncle J. “Well, he’s alert now, which is a good sign.”

I wonder why, after twenty-nine years on the earth, I still have no goddamn idea how a car defroster is supposed to work. Warmer inside? Cooler inside? I don’t get it. And now I can’t see and I have to open a window to clear the fog and it’s raining on my leg and Jesus, what the hell is Mark Fidrych doing on that billboard? And why hasn’t he gotten a haircut in the last twenty years?

I arrive at the house around dinnertime. Everyone’s still alive. Uncle J is apparently looking and feeling pretty good; he had an angioplasty and they put a little stent in the blocked artery. I resolve to address him as “Bionic Uncle” from now on, fix myself a giant vodka tonic, and watch my father cooking chicken in a skillet. My father doesn’t cook often, although he makes a mean Sunday-morning waffle, and when he does, he tends to treat the food like a strange two-year-old with a penchant for biting that he somehow got stuck babysitting for, glaring sternly at it and occasionally poking it gingerly with a wooden spoon. It’s oddly calming to sit in a proper chair that’s not a car and watch my father facing off against the poultry.

I spend the next two or days that way, just observing my family — looking at them, soaking in them. My uncle is doing well; he’s tooling around in the hall when my dad and I arrive at the CCU on Friday. He’s got blood in his irises from the defibrillation, which would look creepier if he didn’t seem sort of proud of it, and he’s annoyed that the paramedics cut off his favorite shirt — in other words, business as usual. He apologizes for putting us to the trouble of coming out to Michigan. He boasts about how low his blood pressure has gotten. It’s so good to see him vertical that I forget all about the “you scare me like that again, you’ll wish you’d died the first time” speech.

But Uncle J is not getting off easy by any means. First of all, duh — he had a heart attack. Heart attacks hurt. A lot. Second of all, his older brother has donned The Lecturing Brow Of Grave Warning. My dad has a number of Lecturing Brows, all exceedingly familiar (not to mention unwelcome) sights to me and Mr. Stupidhead, including but not limited to The Lecturing Brow Of Annoyed Rebuke, The Lecturing Brow Of Long-Suffering Disappointment, The Lecturing Brow Of Please Avail Yourself Of My Common Sense In This Matter Since You Have None Of Your Own, At Least That I Can See, and The Lecturing Brow Of I Don’t Mind This Particular Screw-Up So Much Myself, But Your Mother Is Mad, Hopping Mad In Fact, And Made Me Talk To You So She Wouldn’t Hit You With Her Shoe, all supported by the irritating fact that my father is one of those people who practices what he preaches, so attempting to distract him from the issue at hand by pointing out his hypocrisies never works because he doesn’t appear to have any. But of all the Lecturing Brows, it’s Grave Warning we hate the most, because it’s one thing when Dad is aggravated or patronizing or thinking we need a map and a flashlight to find our butts, but when he gets all sad and serious, it’s just bad. Ask not for whom the brow beetles; it beetles for thee. Uncle J nods haplessly, the same way Mr. S and I do when confronted with a Lecturing Brow. I can empathize, but at the same time I know I have my own Lecturing Brow Of This Would Be A Good Time For You To Quit Smoking, You Know to deal with when I walk Dad down to his car later.

My uncle’s fiancée L is holding a yard sale on Saturday, and a dining set is among the items for sale; my cousins and I sit at the table in the driveway Friday night, eating pizza and watching birds fly over and busting on each other for crap that happened a hundred holidays ago. We only saw each other once every couple of years, growing up, and I like seeing their parents in them and getting to know them, sitting in a driveway at the back end of the time zone where it stays light really late and flicking bits of pizza crust across the table, finding out what happened in their lives when they didn’t have red-and-green sweaters on, laughing about the Lecturing Brows. “Resistance is futile! You will be Dad-similated!” There’s a brief drama in the driveway when one of Uncle J’s cats catches a mouse; the mouse keeps getting up and hobbling away, and the cat keeps re-catching it and playing with it and wandering off again, and each time the mouse hauls itself away, disheveled and disgusted with the entire affair.

On Saturday, the hospital turns Uncle J loose. He putters around the back yard among the remains of the yard sale, drinking iced tea and soaking up the sun. We try to do things for him — fill his glass, give him the good shady seat — but he won’t allow it. Later in the day, his son arrives. Paul is a personal trainer on whom a molecule of body fat will find no purchase; he gives me a giant hug, I re-inflate my lung, we go to lunch and get caught up, and I leave the cousins to their father and their father to his own bed (and The Junior Lecturing Brow Of Healthful Eating wielded by his son) and head back east. It’s a beautiful day, warm and sunny, with the kind of blue-bottomed clouds in the sky that could mean thunderstorms and could mean nothing at all. My uncle is sitting in his den, talking to his best friend and sipping iced tea. Paul is spitting water at Little J, and Little J is telling K to get off the phone, and L is in the kitchen shaking her head at all of them and fixing a salad. My dad is on a golf course in North Carolina. My own little brother is in Queens with his feet up. I am in the front seat of a white Corolla with bird poo on the hood, listening to Patsy Cline, knowing where everyone is and what everyone’s doing, sunburn tingling my forearms, glad to hear and see and feel and drive and belong to a tribe of jerks where a cat that can catch a piece of donut on the fly is a prized pet. Glad to live.

Happy birthday, Uncle J.

June 10, 2002

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