DOI: 10.3726/9781915734822.003.0017

16: Uncle Jim

I am jammed in between two people on the 99 B-Line bus in Vancouver. Every seat is filled and bodies are squeezed shoulder to shoulder along the entire aisle. Like an enormous can of sardines on wheels, the bus lurches along Broadway Avenue en route to the campus of The University of British Columbia, where I am doing my master’s degree. Grabbing the edge of the window behind me, I slide it open. The fresh saltwater air of English Bay floats into the bus and blows across my face. Warm autumn afternoon sun streams in through the window. It’s 2013.

I look around me. Mostly students. Earbuds in. Heads down. Thumbs scrolling or swiftly tapping out text messages on their phones. Pulling out my phone, I notice an email from my sister, Ava. The subject heading says, “Be prepared.”

My lungs constrict. I know it’s about our Uncle Jim, our’s mother’s eldest brother. He was admitted to Sunnybrook Hospital in Toronto a few days ago. Our mom has been visiting him every day since he was admitted. Ava went to visit him yesterday. Jim is 75 years old, and he is dying.

I take a deep breath and open Ava’s email. There are three photos. Jim is stretched out in a hospital bed, his head and torso slightly propped up by pillows. His slight frame is draped in a thin, light blue hospital sheet and a worn, beige blanket. His face is grey and gaunt, like the life is slowly seeping out of him. Silver stubble covers his cheeks and chin. His once straight dark brown hair is salt-and-pepper grey and thinning. Our mom is beside his bed.

In one photo, she leans over the stainless-steel bedside railing with her hand on his arm, as if she’s consoling him.

In another, their hands are clasped in the air above his body, as if she’s trying to restrain him and he is resisting, his face grimacing.

In another, his eyes are closed, and our mom sits in a chair beside his bed. Her hand rests on his shin.

I read Ava’s email. She tells me that Jim is delirious, and that he doesn’t know what’s happening or why he’s in the hospital. She tells me that she was there visiting him yesterday and that she and Mom are going back to see him today.

Sorrow floods my heart. Flipping my phone over, I shift my body to peer out the window. One by one, tall feathery green cedar trees and large white and grey stucco houses whizz by. In between them, I catch glimpses of English Bay and the mountains across the water—Capilano Mountain, Grouse Mountain, and Mount Seymour—pointing into the blue sky.

I don’t know Jim well, but growing up, I always liked him. When I was a child, I saw him a handful of times a year. When I moved away from home as an adult, I would only see him if he was at the farm, visiting my mom, when I flew back from British Columbia to see my family.

Jim is not like my other uncles. My whole life, he never had a girlfriend and never married. He was soft-spoken and gentle. Mysterious and private. Quirky and peculiar. He worked as a travel agent and lived alone in a one-bedroom apartment off Yonge Street, one of the busiest streets in Toronto. Living in the city, he didn’t need a driver’s license. He walked or took the subway or streetcar to get around.

Resembling my grandmother, Nana, more than he did Poppy, my grandfather, Jim was slender, unimposing. When he smoked, a Matinee Slim extra mild rested between long, thin fingers—fingers that looked like Nana’s, except more delicate, and without the polish. Cigarette smoke curled around his slight frame when he talked in a soft, nasal voice. Broody, but in a pleasant, gentle kind of way, he complained a lot. Perhaps this is why I liked him. He was down to earth in a way that my other family members are not.

A couple of times, when Ava and I were young adults—before I began to realize I was queer—we pondered whether Jim might be gay. But, he never disclosed anything, and we never asked him. We didn’t know him well enough to ask a question like that.

Besides, we weren’t that kind of family. The kind of family that talked about personal things or had gay people in it. We were a white, middle-class family who appeared as normal as possible. At family gatherings, my father occasionally performed his impression of an effeminate gay man while my Uncle Jack and Uncle Seth, Jim’s brothers, laughed. Lesbians were never mentioned. And, transgender people? Forget it.

My phone buzzes on my lap. I flip it over. Tapping the green “accept” button, I put the phone to my ear. People standing in the aisle pitch sideways, as the bus roils and sways around a corner.

“Hi, Mom.” I say, quietly, not wanting to disturb the people around me on the bus. “Poor Jimmy. How are you?”

“It’s hard seeing Jim this way. The dementia is bad. He’s really confused and gets upset easily. He’s so thin and he’s hardly eating,” her voice cracks. “Ava and I are going to visit him in a bit.”

She tells me that, over the years, she tried to talk with Jim about his identity. She never directly asked him if he was gay but, she dropped hints now and then. She had hoped that he would trust her enough to confide in her and come out of the closet. That he would stop being so secretive and open up to her about his life. But, he never did.

“Sometimes, I used to call him on the phone just to catch up in the evenings, you know, to find out how he was doing,” she reveals.

“But, there were some nights when he didn’t answer the phone. So, I would leave a message on his answering machine. Then, he would call back the next day and tell me that he was out walking the night before. I always told him I didn’t think it was safe for him to be doing that. It worried me, you know? He went walking alone at night a lot in Toronto. How would he defend himself if something bad happened? He was so gentle and unimposing.”

“Yeah, that would worry me, too, Mom,” I said.

“So, this morning, I called his friend, David, to let him know that Jim is dying.”

“Who’s David?” I ask.

“David’s been a friend of Jim’s for a long time. I met him a couple of times in Toronto when Jim and I had lunch. Years ago, Jim had given him my number and Nana and Poppy’s too. David was the one who called me when Jim first started to show signs of being ill. When Jack and I moved Jim from his apartment into assisted living before he went to Sunnybrook, David helped. He’s a really nice man.”

“Oh.” I respond. I had never heard of David before.

“Anyway, I wanted to give David an update on Jim’s health. I told him about the phone calls at night and Jim not answering the phone some nights and how he would tell me that he was out walking at night and how I would worry about him. Then, David said, ‘Elizabeth, Jim wasn’t out walking on those nights when he didn’t answer his phone. He was out at the clubs on Church Street, meeting men.’”

Stunned, I suck in my breath. Church Street was the main street in the gay village in Toronto.

“David told me that Jim did that a lot. Picking up men he didn’t know and sleeping with them. Even right up until the time he was admitted to Sunnybrook,” she added. “David calls it, ‘cruising.’”

“Yeah, Mom,” I confirm. “That’s what it’s called.”

We talk for a couple more minutes. She says the hardest thing about it all was that she never really got to know her own brother. And, that he never really got to know her.

Blinking back tears, I dab the corners of my eyes with my sleeve.

“I’m so sorry, Mom.”

I tell her I will call her again later today on my way home from school. We say goodbye and hang up. I exhale through pursed lips.

My phone buzzes again. It’s Ava. I pick it up.

“Hi. How are you doing?” I ask.

Ava describes what’s been happening at the hospital and how Jim is doing—sometimes lucid and chatty, sometimes dazed and incoherent. She tells me that she and Mom don’t ask him any questions about his life, and he doesn’t offer anything. What matters, she says, is being in the moment with him and caring for him as his body rapidly declines.

“Yeah, that makes sense,” I reply.

“It must have taken him so much energy to hide himself from us all these years,” she muses.

“Totally,” I agree.

My heart feels like it’s being squeezed. I think about the things I have done over the years to hide my identity from people. I wonder what kinds of things Jim did to keep his a secret.

Thanking Ava for being there for Jim and for Mom, I feel a twinge of guilt about living so far away from my family. But, I am used to that feeling.

We say goodbye and hang up.

My throat tightens. It’s hard to accept that Jim, the gay uncle I never really had a chance to know, is dying, helpless, in a hospital bed, thousands of kilometers away. It’s hard to accept that even on his deathbed, he still can’t bring himself to reveal who he is.

The heaviness of grief and loss spreads across my chest. Grief and loss for Jim’s life, shrouded in secrecy. That he was unable to have full, honest relationships with his family members. That I was cheated out of the joy of a connection with a gay elder to whom I could look for advice and talk about “gay things” and what it meant to live and love differently from what surrounded us in rural, southern Ontario. That, among our family, Jim and I never experienced feeling that we weren’t alone in our queerness. That homophobia can wrap its insidious grip around us, like tentacles, thick and coarse, trying to strangle the life from our queer bodies.

As the bus hurtles towards campus, I stare out the window. Giant coniferous trees of the Pacific West Coast rush by and I weep silently, praying no one notices.