Everybody Needs an Uncle Pat

My uncle Pat died last week. He was 68. Far too young — especially young for someone who gave much of the last decade to his parents, my beloved grandparents, and by extension his whole family.

He stepped into caretaking for my grandfather after he had his stroke, moving in with my grandparents until my grandfather passed, remaining to assist my grandmother in her final years. He developed cancer amidst all his caretaking, a health situation that never resolved the way any of us wanted it to.

I’m relieved my uncle is no longer in pain. But I admit remaining rattled by the injustice of it all: I can’t help thinking of numerous celebrities and politicians who get to keep living their awful lives, well into their seventies and beyond; meanwhile, my humble uncle is gone.

I imagine I’ll be wrestling with the Lord for a while over how things “should” have gone for Pat. It’s perhaps my closest-to-home example yet of how this broken world makes no sense sometimes.

And yet whether Pat lived to 68 or 98, I cannot deny his legacy, particularly the one word that surfaces again and again when I think of him.

Servant.

The servant sentiment is all over his obituary’s guestbook page and infused in all of our family’s conversations with one another. Uncle Pat served others. He constantly did things for people — his parents, everyone. Gifted in carpentry and craftsmanship, he particularly shined when it came to home repairs and renovations, particularly amidst my aging grandparents and their aging house.

Uncle Pat was as faithful as they come, loving Jesus and loving people, devoting his life to whatever God called him to do. He put his life on hold for nearly a decade to care for his ailing parents, the last decade he’d live on this earth — although I’m sure he’d disagree with that “on hold” descriptor. Despite whatever other dreams he may have had for the rest of his life, I’m also certain he never felt his life was paused or wasted.

Uncle Pat had a crystal-clear sense of responsibility and love, and he was always right where he felt God wanted him to be.

Toward the end of 2014 I was traveling the country in a Mitsubishi Galant, and I stayed with Pat and my grandparents in Pennsylvania over the holidays. When discussing New Year’s plans with my friend Katie in Georgia, we decided it’d be swell to spend the night in Times Square. My poor Galant filled to the brim with all my life’s belongings, Pat offered to pick up Katie with me from the airport, and she and I did indeed acquire that life experience.

Time and again on numerous visits to my homeland, Pat also transported me to/from the airport and train station, regardless the time of day, never complaining or feeling obligated despite his health challenges these last few years. He recruited me for help readying my grandparents’ house for sale last year, and he always insisted on paying me.

One December years ago, Pat took me and my sister to an incredible old church in Philadelphia for a Christmas Eve service. Afterward, he spontaneously decided to take us to nearby Nottingham, home to a famed Zuniga family Christmas story, where my grandparents and their children spent their first Christmas in Pennsylvania after moving north from Texas. Pat drove my sister and me right past their old house, delighted that we could see it for ourselves after reading about it for years in my grandfather’s yearly emails.

Not once did anyone else in my family ever think to take me to the old Zuniga Nottingham house until Uncle Pat did.

Pat never married or had children, and this has long inspired me. Now in my mid-thirties, I don’t foresee marriage or children for my life-story. More than any sort of “lack” this present-future elicits, I am better seeing my singleness in the gainful sort of way Paul wrote about in Scripture. I feel emboldened by how Henri Nouwen lived out his own singleness in service to the disabled and countless others, and I view Uncle Pat in the same light.

Of course, sometimes I do peer ahead at the next thirty or fifty years and wonder where the purpose — or the love — will come from. Will anyone surround me on my own deathbed?

With assurance and comfort, I can now look at Uncle Pat: a man who lived with incredible purpose and love until his dying breath. My beautiful parents took him into their Georgia home in his final months, and he was visited and surrounded by his family until the very day he died.

I got to visit Uncle Pat mere hours before he passed. It pained me to see him gasping for breath, his eyes clasped shut, his spirit clearly drifting. I had written him a letter the week before, a letter I’d hoped to send him or read for him in the months to come. I thought I still had a few months to perfect my words.

I didn’t know months would be days, that my drafted words would forever be left imperfect.

I never got to send or read him that letter, though I stammered a few of those recollections in my final moments alone with him. Perhaps writing that letter was more for my soul than his. Maybe I’ll fully tell him all he meant to me one day in eternity. How I hope for that day.

Pat deeply cared about his parents’ legacy — our family’s legacy. I can see why this mattered to him as someone without any children of his own. I think about that, too: what will I pass on? To whom? Who will care?

He’s entrusted me with some of his belongings, including a slew of letters, documents, and photographs. I told him I’d steward our family’s legacy well, providing a generational conduit of the story God wrote in my grandfather and grandmother to my nieces and future nephews and hopefully generations yet to come.

But when I tell the story of my grandparents, I want to tell the story of Uncle Pat, too. For his own story is worthy of a legacy: a man who walked his father to the bathroom and fed him and talked with him even when he struggled to talk back, day after day, night after night for six long years. He continued to care for his mother and share precious time with her, including Jeopardy! five nights a week for the next three years until her passing.

Recalling my Edenesque childhood with Uncle Pat, I think instantly of his old Jeep Wrangler. Our drives around Langhorne in his zipper-down plastic windows. To this day, I see a Jeep and think of Pat; the two are forever intertwined.

He often walked me and my siblings to the 7-Eleven down the street for nectarous Slurpees. How it makes me smile to have treated him to a Slurpee this past spring before we sold my grandparents’ house.

One precious memory of Uncle Pat is one I can’t fully tell, and that’s okay; it’s a memory for he and I to share. He had been arguing with his brother who also lived in my grandparents’ house, and he said something admittedly out of character. Knowing I was in the neighboring room, unavoidably listening, he apologized to me, confessing he’d let his emotions get the better of his tongue.

My uncle’s humility that day shaped him with renewed strength. And he was already one of the strongest men I knew. I also couldn’t help noticing his bond grow with that aforementioned brother during some difficult transitions in the years ahead.

“I wish I had an Uncle Pat,” my dad said with teary eyes on a family-wide Zoom call just a couple weeks before his passing. We were discussing Pat’s fated prognosis, funeral plans, and all the other awful things you must discuss when someone’s life is flickering before your eyes.

And yet despite the gloom in the Zoom room that day, there was also unspeakable light. My dad spoke of the spiritual influence his brother had had on his three kids, along with the emotional investment in each of us. Pat cared for his parents, he cared for his brother and other siblings, he cared for his nieces and nephews, and he cared for his grandnieces and grandnephews.

Pat just cared. A measured sincerity in his voice made you feel special.

He’s gone too soon, and I really, really hate it. I dreamt of countless adventures for him in a life beyond caretaking and cancer. He’d hiked the Appalachian Trail and enjoyed many-a-campout, and I always hoped he’d venture down to the Blue Ridge to visit me. Perhaps we’d have shared in an epic outdoor trek. I lament that we never did.

And yet despite the tragedy on this side of eternity’s curtain, I can only imagine the bliss he’s discovering on the other side — reunited with his parents whom he served so well, and reuniting with other family members, no doubt eager to connect the generations there as he did here.

I became an uncle six years ago, and Uncle Pat has always been my template for uncling. Because everyone needs an Uncle Pat. Someone to remember them on their birthdays, buy them Slurpees, ask about their lives, and drive them around on special journeys.

If my nieces or future nephews ever have anything positive to say about their Uncle Tom, it will be because Uncle Pat showed me how to uncle well. His legacy will live through me beyond a box of photographs.

Of all the earthly injustices, another is that many people do not have an uncle Pat in their lives. I thank God in His grace for sparing me of this injustice. How grateful I am never to know a life without such an uncle in mine.

I can’t wait to see how he fixes up the Zuniga corner of Paradise’s mansion.