My Uncle Bob spent the last three weeks of his life fishing.
In failing health he had been admitted to a nursing home by his daughters, who despite their love for their father, could no longer care for him.
He didn’t know a soul in the place, my cousin Mary Ann told me over the phone, so he would lie on his back with his eyes closed and go through the motions of casting his line.
“Did you see that one,” he would ask.
“Dad was still fishing,” Mary Ann told me.
Eventually he just stopped breathing and slipped quietly away during the night. That was Uncle Bob, never wanting a fuss made over him.
I can see him sitting in the bow of his 14-foot boat, a sculling paddle in one hand and a long bamboo pole in the other, dropping minnows into submerged brush piles in the shallow bays, hoisting out crappie and bass.
Uncle Bob had been a grocer in Indiana and Kentucky until a heart attack prompted his retirement from the A&P Tea Co. He and Aunt Betty bought a house in the woods near a TVA reservoir where they kept a bird dog, raised tomatoes, and fished the big lake just down the hill.
They had invited me for a visit shortly before I first got married and I was taken with the country. Western Kentucky was rolling and tree covered and we caught lots of fish.
My wife and I eventually moved to an apartment less than a mile from Uncle Bob and Aunt Betty’s place and I got a job at a marina on the lake.
For two years I lived in Kentucky and my mother’s brother became my best friend. We hunted and fished together, I helped him get in his firewood and we explored the wilder country in the area on foot.
We even picked mistletoe one winter intending to sell it, but instead traded our harvest for a case of beer at the A&P in Paducah where Uncle Bob knew the manager.
I moved to Montana for good the next summer and over the years my uncle and I lost touch. I knew he’d moved in with my cousin in Louisville a few years after Aunt Betty died and I saw him one last time in South Carolina at Mary Ann’s two years ago.
She had warned me Uncle Bob suffered from occasional bouts of dementia, but I wouldn’t have known. Although his hearing was about gone and his eyesight failing, he was the same old Uncle Bob to me.
“We sure had some good times together, didn’t we?” he asked. “I don’t hunt or fish any more, you know. I hope you still do.”
I told him yes, I hunt and fish more than I should and he said that was OK, nothing wrong with huntin’ and fishin.’
So I’m taking my uncle’s advice.
It served him well to the end of his days.
And he knew from where his blessing came. Uncle Bob paid an organist to play Sundays at the tiny country church he attended a few miles from the lake because otherwise the church would have no music.
No wonder he got to fish until the very end.