Uncles.

When my daughter finished school and was accepted into university, one of my uncles – the middle one – phoned with his congratulations. The university had been the only one in the state when he was a lad, and although others had sprung up he still regarded this one as the one. “First one in the family to go there!”, he kept saying in a thrilled and proud kind of way.

My daughter didn’t quite get the import of her actions. It was a different era. When my uncle and his brothers had been growing up, the university had been unobtainable, a pipe dream, something that didn’t belong with their class. Something only other people could afford.

And anyway, there’d been a war to fight.

When our dad died and we were oh-so-young it just wasn’t fair, he didn’t have a lot to leave us. There was his superannuation, which kept us, and then our mother,  afloat forever. There was a bit of money that had been put aside for our tertiary education and the girls’ weddings. But the house was mortgaged and not big enough and there was no car, and our mother had never paid a bill, filled in a tax form or managed the budget in her life. She was also an only child.

Our dad had grown up the third in a family of four boys. So he left us his brothers. The uncles.  He entrusted us to their keeping.

The uncles were not men of particular wealth or outstanding talents. They were just reasonably young men, working at jobs and living their lives and making, as best they could, ends meet. One of them had his own young children to rear.

And they had just watched their brother die, the impact upon them something I took years to realise and acknowledge. One of my uncles once told us that when our dad died my sister had met him at his car, stared up at him with her big round eyes and asked, “Why didn’t you die? You’re the oldest, you’re s’posed to die first you know.” He carried the moment with him forever.

The uncles stepped up. Between them, they became the most important men in our lives. They visited with us and we with them. They chopped our wood and helped pay the school fees. They took us to the football and movies and wonderfully extravagant meals, and on train journeys and car rides, picnics and barbecues. They played cricket and basketball with us in our backyard. They told jokes and funny anecdotes. They gave us our family’s history, and our father’s history too, and a couple of dollars to spend here and there on whatever we wanted. They gave us, and took us on, holidays. They celebrated birthdays and Easters and Christmases with us, took great interest in our lives, asked us questions and listened to our answers, and gave us a taste of alcohol and double scoop ice creams and Minties. Replying to the invitation to one of my sisters’ weddings, one of the uncles wrote in capital letters, “We’ll be there with bells on!”

They loved us. Just because.

But this isn’t, of course, a fairy story, and so the uncles began to grow old. Illness and infirmities stalked them, indignities were waiting to pounce. Life became harder and more restricted for them.  They lived on so many decades longer than our father had. The elder two died.

The youngest, the baby of the family, turned 90 this month. There was a party afternoon tea, a lovely celebration with family and friends. He’s had a rough year health wise but pulled through. He’s been pulling through since he was a too-young soldier and injured his back so badly it’s been an issue – an extremely painful one – for his living ever since. But there he was, being feted, his wife, his children and his grandchildren making everything happen. He said, in his eye twinkly way, that the party was the best day of his life and he’d had to wait an awful long time to get to it.

We won’t have him forever, we know that. We’re all aging adults now ourselves,  we know the ways of the world. We’ve learned – the very hardest ways – about living and dying, youth and age. But we’re hanging onto the 90-year-old perhaps a little too tightly, and definitely for as long as we possibly can.

Because we can’t imagine living in a world without an uncle in it.