Pat Taub
GUEST POST By LISA SAVAGE
Who’s the oldest here? is a phrase I heard frequently while growing up as the eldest of four siblings. Generally, it meant that I was about to get punished for a scuffle with my brother or sister and as a result the phrase had negative connotations.
My uncle in his navy uniform (back row, far left) for Thanksgiving in Maine, 1959. My parents are on the far right, and I’m on the far left in the front row.
Now the phrase is coming to mind as I process the loss of my uncle, only sibling of either of my parents. Both my mom and dad died years ago but my mother’s much younger brother lived to age 85 before succumbing to congestive heart failure. Interestingly, he was midway in the Voluntary Assisted Dying program in Queensland, Australia, and probably would have qualified had he made it through the process.
My uncle and his only sibling, my mother, as children in California.
I don’t begrudge him his longed-for release from pain and suffering. Arthritis had ended his much-loved hobby of building musical instruments for friends. He was cold all the time due to poor circulation, and had taken several painful falls in the past year. That on top of hospitalizations for symptoms of heart failure had made him miserable. But I’m still very sad to see him go.
My uncle always loved to play music. Here he is (far right) sitting in with my sister Hope at her Farmers Market gig during his visit to Maine.
In 2024 I visited after he’d been hospitalized for the first time. He was home by then, using a chainsaw to cut up fallen trees for firewood, and sometimes puttering around in his yard barefoot. (You can take the boy out of southern California, but you can’t take the California out of the boy.) We had a nice visit and a few tourist outings arranged by my aunt who married my uncle long after I was an adult.
My uncle was a great watcher and feeder of birds. Here we are on my last visit to Australia contemplating a wild turkey on Tambourine Mountain in Queensland.
My aunt is the oldest generation in what’s left of my birth family. Then why do I feel like the torch has passed to me and my siblings as the oldest generation? It’s a sobering thought.
My loving aunt has been good to us, but here’s how she can never fill the gap left by my uncle’s passing: she doesn’t remember the things that only he and I were still around to remember. Like him living in our garage in Venice, California when he got out of the navy. Like him coming over on weekends with comic books and MAD Magazines he had finished reading. Driving over the Grapevine between the San Fernando and San Joaquin valleys in a freak snowstorm with my late brother and I hanging out the window to tell him when he crossed the white line. Going down to the harbor in San Pedro to see his ship off when he emigrated to Australia in 1967.
We’ve had some fun visits in the past few years. I’ve gone there, he’s come here, and at one point several of us convened in Nova Scotia and then drove with my uncle back to Maine. The border guard who seemed about 12 years old expressed astonishment that my uncle had an Australian passport with his birthplace listed as Oklahoma City. The explanation that Australia’s national phone company required it as a condition of employment did not compute.
My uncle on the right with the sign he requested I make for our post Charlottesville vigil in Skowhegan.
The oldest generation is supposed to be wise and resourceful, right? I’m not sure I’ve managed either and I miss my uncle who was, in many ways, both. I am glad he’s no longer suffering, but I wasn’t ready to step in to his role.
Lisa Savage is a retired teacher, who continues post-retirement, to engage in organizing around pushing back on genocide and militarism. She blogs at: went2thebridge.substack.com
