For Uncle David

My Uncle David was eight years older than me. My mother helped raise him — he and my Aunt Julie — after my grandparents died while he was still a minor. She raised them alongside me, her only child. So he was an uncle on paper, but in the shape of the family he was something closer to a brother, and she was something closer to a mother to him than an older sister.

He died in 2018 in a homeless camp in Johnson City, Tennessee. He had a little tent site there. He had been making a life for himself in that hard place — the way people do, when they have to. A snowstorm came through, sleet and snow stacked up on the canvas while he was asleep, and the tent collapsed. He died of hypothermia.

That is the true story. The autopsy said so. But the family decided he died of the alcoholism. The family decided he drank himself to death, that it was finally what got him, that the long slow ending had caught up. That isn't what happened. He froze. He was asleep, and the weather came down, and his shelter wasn't enough.

I am writing this here, on this page, because the official story was wrong and somebody needed to put the real one down where it can be read.

How he got there

Before Tennessee he had been living with me in Darien, Georgia. He got sick — vomiting blood — and ended up in the hospital. He needed real treatment, more than I could give him, and so I helped get him down to Faith Farms in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. It was the right call. He did well there for a couple of years. He was sober. He was steady.

I want to be honest about my part in this. I didn't write to him the way I should have. I stayed in touch as best I could, but I was in my own recovery from substance misuse, in my own survival mode, and I did not put in what I wish I had. Hindsight has a flat, cold light to it. I see it now.

Eventually he got more freedom at Faith Farms and got involved with people he should not have gotten involved with. He went to a department store with them, things got stolen, he said he wasn't part of the theft but he was treated as an accomplice. He got arrested. He got kicked out of the treatment center. Somehow he ended up in Johnson City with a guy and a girl. The girl left. The guy stayed for a while, and then the guy left too. And David stayed. In a tent. In a camp. For a long time. Making it work.

The phone calls

He would call me. We were friends on Facebook. He would call me drunk and he would cry, and cry, and cry, and what he was crying for was my mother. He wanted her to tell him she loved him. He wanted his big sister, the woman who had raised him after their parents died, to pick up the phone and say his name with any tenderness at all.

She would not.

She let it go to voicemail. Or she would answer and immediately hang up. Every time. A grown man, drunk and crying in a tent in the snow, calling the closest thing he had to a mother, and getting the click of a phone hanging up. Over and over.

It is one thing to say I can't help you. It is another thing entirely to refuse to even speak to someone who is crying out for you. I hated her for it then. I am angry about it still.

What this kind of grief is called

There is a name for what happens when somebody refuses to acknowledge a wound they are causing. There is a name for grieving a person who is still alive but who keeps choosing to be unreachable. They call it ambiguous grief. Living loss. There is no funeral for it. No casserole. No card. You just stand there holding a phone that doesn't ring back, the same way David held his.

My mother has done the same to me since David died. Alienated me. Abandoned me. She has done versions of it across all fifty-five years of my life. And when I point at it — when I name what she's doing — she looks straight through me as if the wound isn't there, as if my hand isn't there, as if I'm not there. That blank wall is its own kind of cruelty. Often it is the worse one.

She will not see it. Not because I haven't explained it well enough, but because seeing it isn't survivable for her. So she does the only thing that keeps her intact: she acts like the thing isn't happening. And if the thing isn't happening, then I must be the one making it up. That is the math she needs to live with her own choices. It was the math she used on David, too.

Why this page exists

Heart of Care exists in part because of what happened to him, and what keeps happening to me. The grief work on this site — the workbooks, the guides, the slow porch-paced sentences about ambiguous loss and silent families and recovering in the wake of someone you couldn't save — all of it traces back to David. To the phone calls. To the tent. To the sister who would not say his name.

I am sorry, Uncle David. I am sorry I didn't write more. I am sorry she would not pick up. I am sorry the story they told about how you died was the wrong story, and I am sorry it took me this long to put the right one somewhere it could be found.

You were not what they said you were at the end. You were a man calling your sister. You were a man trying. You froze in a Tennessee snowstorm in a tent that wasn't enough, and you deserved a phone that picked up.

Rest easy now. Somebody finally said it out loud.