Uncle Ace

 

. . . (A)nd lo, I am with you alway,

even unto the end of the world. Amen.

                                                                                    -- Matthew 28:20b

 

We buried my uncle, David J. Miller, last week, after a battle with emphysema. It was one of those funerals where you laughed really hard, and cried really hard, and went away with such a sense of the person it was as if they were going home with you in the car.

 

Uncle Dave was just what you'd want in an uncle: handsome and impish, funny and tender, great at business and sales, and always giving his all for his family. He was one of those dads who was out there throwing the football with his two boys and playing a clown at the school carnival to the delight of his two girls. He was incredibly good to Aunt Nancy throughout her life and in her final battle with leukemia.

 

We called him "Uncle Ace."

 

He was my mother's only brother, a little older. Since my grandmother was a working mother before working motherhood was cool, as one of the first employees of Mutual of Omaha, Uncle Ace was often responsible for my mother.

 

He would have to take her places on the streetcar and around the neighborhood. He started calling her "Sister." Pretty soon, everyone called her that. He finally admitted that he did it to make sure the girls his age wouldn't think she was his DATE.

 

She was impish, too. She got into an argument once with a little boy, and they conspired to have their big brothers settle it. She stood there and held Dave's coat as he was forced to get into a fistfight with a much bigger boy. But guess who won? No way was he going to let "Sister" down. He never did, either.

 

I love looking at photos of them from the 1930s and '40s. He was always grinning, with his head tipped and his big ears sticking out, and she was kind of nestled in to him, with a big hair bow on the side. They had matching "take on the world" expressions.

 

Life sped by, and they both married wonderful people. Each had four kids. They lived in the same city and their relationship just got stronger and sweeter.

 

On Sundays at Grammie's, the adults would pull the pocket door shut in the study so that they could talk quietly, while us eight kids rampaged, unsupervised, outside their grasp. The message was clear: throughout life, and especially within immediate families, relationship is everything, and adult family relationships need to be tended with time and effort.

 

They were in there so long, that one time, we cut the shag carpet in Grammie's living room with scissors and "raked" it into piles for "burning." After that, they left the pocket door open a few inches.

 

Oddly enough, three times my mom was in a traffic accident . . . and Uncle Dave happened by.

 

Once, we were hurrying to pick up Dad at the airport, and got into a fender-bender. We had to wait for the police, and were worried about missing Dad's plane. Presto! Here came Uncle Dave, pulling over out of rush-hour traffic. He leaned out of his car, grinning at my mom's predicament, and said he'd go to the airport and bring Dad back to us.

 

Another time, Mom had a flat tire just a couple of blocks from home. She was wondering what to do, when, what in the world? Here came Uncle Dave, pulling over, grinning, and changing the flat in nothing flat.

 

We can't remember what the third time was. But we know these weren't coincidences.

 

They're examples of how each of us believers has a few people "assigned" to us here on Earth, to look after us, and love us, and let us know that we're never alone if we love the Lord. Uncle Dave, the sales rep, was a "rep" for the Lord.

 

So now that he's gone, I'm not sad. He's still with Mom in spirit, and they'll be together again. In the harsh light of this 9/11 anniversary, and the Hurricane Katrina aftermath, it's good to know.

 

It's good to think about all the Uncle Aces out there -- being there for others, doing the Lord's work, being in the right place at the right time.

 

And when Mom gets to the Pearly Gates. . .

 

. . . Uncle Ace will be there, smiling, his halo tipped impishly on his big ears, holding out a pair of wings to "Sister," and teasing her: "What took you so long?"

 

'Til then, Beloved, rest up . . . and know that you were loved. †