Seven Dead Uncles

In which I ponder why men live and die as they do.

I recently wrote about my Uncle Keith [you can read this here] who died a couple of years ago. What inspired me to write that was a prompt: “Music”. In deciding what to write, I chewed over some of my favourite anecdotes: the time I sneaked into a Nirvana concert by slipping the bouncer a tenner, or the time a school friend persuaded me to sneak up to the “big city” with him to watch a Scorpions concert and we had a little run in with the police. A lot of sneaking goes on when you’re young. I was better at it then.

The answer came to me from a random jumble of things: I would write about the death of my Uncle Keith. Within the awful last few weeks of his life, I had come to understand something of his love for opera, and even to love one or two pieces of it myself, when I had had, up until then, an almost visceral dislike of Opera. In a way it’s like my hatred of musicals. I shudder at the concept of them, but at the same time, I think Oliver and My Fair Lady are wonderful.

Just as it can be a soundtrack to one’s life journey, this music accompanied me on the short trip down the cul-de-sac of my uncle’s death: Lascia ch'io pianga opera music so achingly beautiful, I can barely hear it without tears forming. It is in stark contrast to the horribly dirty cottage where Keith lived; the years of suffering he had to endure and the demeaning stroke that saw him spend his last days in a hospice - a place he swore he would never go - unable to speak his mind.

Montserrat Caballe - image from youtube

I am writing about uncle Keith again because very recently, another of my uncles died; uncle Severin. One uncle dying is sad, and two is sadder of course. But when I counted the number of my uncles that have died, I was stunned to realise it was seven. I have only lost one auntie during the same time - a blessing but one that really made me think.

I should stop here to say a little bit about my family. It is not a typical one. The simplest way to say it is that I have three fathers, and on occasion, I have had four. There’s “Bio-Dad” (this is obvious), “Dad-Dad” (the man who married my mum adopted me and raised me as his own and gave me his name - sometimes unfairly referred to as “Adopto-Dad”) and “Step Dad”. Twice I have had a father-in-law, but you lose them when you get divorced. Like mother like son, you might say in my case. But when your parents divorce, you don’t lose your uncles and aunts, at least; except to death.

Uncle Severin is the seventh of my uncles to have died, and next youngest brother to my Bio Dad, my natural father. Severin’s name always fascinated me. The second youngest of eleven children that my incredibly strong Nanna Lucy gave birth to. One died in infancy, but ten of them grew up in a part of India that became Pakistan. A relatively comfortable, last-days-of-the-Raj existence, until they were politely required to return to England where they too could then experience relative poverty.

With ten children, you can imagine there are a lot of cousins, twelve to be precise (on that side). Sad though it was to hear of Sevvy’s death, it was not wholly unexpected. A family funeral is now the only thing that brings us all together as all the uncles and aunts creak towards very old age, and most of the cousins are married, pretty much. Some have grown up kids of their own now, and some of them too have children. Is that a 2nd cousin or a first cousin twice removed? I can never work that out. I don’t think there are such things as gruncles twuncles and thruncles, but perhaps there should be.

My earliest memories of Uncle Severin are closely tied to those of Nanna Lucy, because he lived with her, as a sort of carer, I suppose. Nanna Lucy’s home was a focal point for that side of the family for many years. When I would come down from “the North” to see my Bio-Dad, we would always visit Nanna. Her house was full of the Aunties and of course many cousins. The smell of boiling fudge and frying “kalkals” {image below) would fill the kitchen as would the chat of the Aunties. Their Indian accents and perfect diction was very strange to my northern ears. Severin, however, would usually sit in the other room with a pint or a cuppa and a copy of the racing post, whilst he watched the racing. He was a quiet man who loved a beer and a flutter.

When he died, at his funeral service, I was struck with how little I really had known of him. Bio Dad told me he had worked for the BBC and had taken early redundancy because he had begun to fall ill with a strange malady of his oesophagus - the pipe that joins your throat to your stomach. Despite many operations to remove and replace parts of this pipe with other parts of his bowels, Severin became unable to swallow properly and had to wash his food down with litres of water. He was a quiet man and would rarely take the lead in conversations with his much more vocal and boisterous brothers - my dad, and uncles Jim, Tony and Andrew. He never married and had no children. He lived with his mum and looked after little Nanna until she died and that is really all I knew about him.

His funeral was a strange affair. Despite this side of the family being ostensibly Catholic (11 siblings, after all) none of them are church goers, that I am aware of. This was reflected in the order of service and the eulogy of the celebrant - there was not a whisper of the divine within either. From the eulogy I learned two things about Sev that I didn’t know - that he had habit of feeding the wild foxes in the area who would come to his garden regularly, and that he was quite handy at darts.

It struck me how little there was that any of us could celebrate about Sev and his life, and I was reminded of my Uncle Keith whose life was starkly similar. Both single, no children; lived with their parents, cared for them until they died; retired young due to ill health, from which they both suffered for years, and died alone. Sev, at least, seems to have died at home, from a heart attack, on his sofa, after a night at his local with his darts mates. Not such a bad way to go, if you have to go.

Within the Order of Service, there were three charming photographs of Uncle Sev. One as a cheeky, jumper-clad imp with his arm round his older brother Jim, who to this day has the same look of impending mischief in his eyes. One of Sev in his young hippyish days with a flowery shirt and wide belt. He’s staring into the sun, squinting slightly, a look of perplexion on his face - “Hurry up and take it.” he seems to be saying. On the front page, a much older Sev stands, rigid and uncomfortable, sunglasses on and a field of wildflowers behind him. Again, he has a look of perplexion on his face, even embarrassment at being the subject of a photograph. He stands stock still, but you can see he is desperate to move out of the camera’s stare.

The wonderful poem “to Sleep” by Keats greets you as you open the pamphlet, alluding both to the joyful release of sleep and to death. I cannot imagine Sev knowing of this poem or having the foresight to leave written somewhere his wishes for how he would want his funeral service; his was a day by day existence, if he was as similar to Keith as it seemed to me. Perhaps it was a stock item, dropped in by the funeral parlour who produce these things for us.

With the final words of the celebrant, we sat in anticipation of the solemn and symbolic opening and closing of the curtains around Sev’s coffin. But then “Matthew and Son” by Cat Stephens began to play. The up-tempo refrain of this song “And they’ve been working all day…all day…all day!” together with the lively brass instrumentation of trombones and sax throughout, was startlingly incongruous. It seemed impossibly wrong, almost a joke even. The cognitive dissonance of watching my dead uncle descend into the flames whilst desperately trying to stop my feet tapping …something some of my cousins echoed later as we drank ourselves into laughter at the wake.

But what am I trying to say here? There is a point, a direction to this. At the wake, as well as all of my wonderful family - all four of dad’s sisters (sounding even more Indian than ever), my cousins (even the youngest now in her thirties) and my half-sister, there was Sev’s young neighbour. I shall call him Phil, because, yes, I have forgotten his name, as I always immediately do with people I meet. Phil had lived in the maisonette upstairs from Sev for a number of years, and had become friendly with him, and familiar with his routines of the pub and the foxes. On occasion, Sev had asked him to turn his music down, but otherwise, they were congenial neighbours. Phil lived alone, divorced from his wife, seemingly happy with his work as a driving instructor and seemingly ok with the world.

Phil had called the ambulance and the police, because he had found Sev dead. When he realised he hadn’t heard from or seen Sev for a couple of days, Phil had knocked on the door and when there was no answer, he had looked through the windows, and seen Sev. As he was telling us this, it become obvious that what he had seen had been traumatic. Phil became visibly distressed and short of breath. He looked as if he was fighting back tears. He asked us if we wouldn’t mind if he didn’t say more about what exactly he had seen - only that Sev was very obviously dead.

We thanked Phil for being such a good neighbour, and we talked about Sev’s life. As I wondered just what it was that Phil had seen, I imagined that perhaps Sev had been feeding the foxes one last time - my mind does work like this, which is great for writing horror, but not appropriate to bring up at a wake. I did manage to say nothing, but I did talk about uncle Keith. I talked about the similarities with Sev’s life, and how I had read somewhere that the single man dies much younger and far less happy than the married man, whilst to a degree, the converse is true for women. At this, Phil did actually start to cry a little bit. We had all had a few gin and tonics and pints by then, and there was some back slapping and man-hugging. Phil rallied round and went to the bar. But this had struck him hard, and his reaction stays with me.

Seven dead uncles, and one dead aunt. My eldest uncle Jack and his wife died many years ago, at ripe old ages, and that is how it should be, in the nature of things. We feel that is right, don’t we?

Uncles Eric and David also died at good ages, both married and both with children - I am not sure from what, but neither of them were young men. Their wives - my lovely aunties, are still alive, and one is a great grandmother.

Uncle Mike, from my adopted side of the family, died very young from aggressive cancer. He had barely any notice or time to prepare for it. He was a bit of a dreamer, a hippy, a lovely man. He liked prog rock, ganja and angling. He would do odd jobs, manual jobs; demolition, dusty dirty work. That sort of thing. He was also the editor of a fishing magazine. Back in those days maggots were stained with a highly carcinogenic dye - chrysoidine. It is banned now. Apparently, anglers’ hands would be noticeably stained with this orange chemical. Some were even known to warm the maggots in their mouths to liven them up before baiting their hooks. And there you go.

Uncle Tony died in his early fifties from chronic lung disease caused by his daily habit of smoking cannabis resin and hand rolled cigarettes. Despite a lung and heart transplant, he never quite managed to stop the puff altogether, and died from it.

And uncle Keith and Uncle Sev - I have told of their solitary deaths and poor health already.

Seven dead uncles, and one dead aunt – what is going on here? I’m a man of words, but sometimes you have to look at the numbers to tell your story. The following facts are taken from the UK Office of National Statistics and span their last full decade 2010 to 2019. They are just bare facts – they give no reason or rhyme. The numbers I’ve calculated below are derived from comparisons of ASMR - Age Standardised Mortality Rates - expressed as deaths per 100,000 persons. The higher the number, the higher the rate of death.

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Between the ages of 20 to 64.

2010 Men 57% more likely to die than women if single, 35% more likely to die than women if married. Single men 96% more likely to die than married men.

2019 Men 67% more likely to die than women if single, 29% more likely to die if married. Single men 116% more likely to die than married men.

65 and over

2010 Single men 45% more likely to die than single women. Single men 83% more likely to die than married men

2019 Single men 84% more likely to die than single women. Divorced men 110% more likely to die than married men.

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The statistics are quite clear, and the trend is worsening, and worsening rapidly. Where might the graph end up, when we factor in the growing isolation that social media and remote (from human contact) working is bringing us?

There will be all manner of reasons for these stats, no doubt, and it would be trite of me to suggest just one as a cause, wouldn’t it? I’ll take a chance. I think it’s because men don’t care about themselves. We need someone or something to care for. We need someone that cares about us or needs us, to make us care for ourselves. We need something to do, something that validates our existence. If we don’t have that, then we won’t make the effort. The last thing I remember uncle Keith saying before he had his stroke, when I offered to get someone round to help him clean his house, was this: “The only person that has to live here is me, and I don’t care.”

I also speak from experience – a little of it anyway. There is a joke in our house that when my fiancée is away, I’ll just amuse myself by slobbing around eating huge blocks of cheddar in my underpants (I’m in the underpants, not the cheddar.) And in times when I have been single and had nobody to care about but myself, I have indeed done precisely that. Once or twice. When I think about Phil, Sev’s kind neighbour, perhaps thoughts like this were crossing his mind and moved him to tears. Thoughts of a lonely life and a lonely death on that sofa, just beneath him in the flat below and nobody to care for but scavenging foxes.

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