Farewell, King

My Uncle Barry died five months ago today.

My Uncle Barry is dead. I have to say it aloud sometimes to remember.

My family shares this loss, for which I'm grateful, but I forget to grieve alone. In the midst of this tragic blow to the foundation of my family, I almost don't have the energy. And I don't know how to handle grief. Not this one. I sob, I ignore it all together, I laugh hysterically, I panic, I talk as if Barry were still on the couch at the house on Schuyler, I forget that I can't call him to ask how the hell to work my computer or the effects of string instruments or what Greek currency has to do with this life insurance book I'm writing. My aunt changed her cell phone number to his, and I almost had a heart attack when "Uncle Barry" popped up on my phone, and it was just her calling to say Happy New Year. (Changed that shit RIGHT quick.)

I see these posts like this on Facebook all the time, and I am embarrassed to say that I scroll right past them the majority of the time. A) I'm not on Facebook tryina be depressed all day, but more importantly, B) what is there to say? It's their loss, and all the love in the world doesn't fill that void, even if it does help the healing process. You can say you're sorry. You can sympathize. You can send good thoughts. But you can't "like" that Aunt Sally died. (I mean you could, especially if you wanted to start shit. Which, naive Kyle is finally learning, is a thing that people do every fucking day. But I digress.)

My ex and my uncle used to bond over jazz all the time. Instrumental stuff, namely. Though I dug the music, the conversations bored me to tears. I appreciate the sheer artistry and the beauty of it all, but being a writer in addition to being a musician, I place equal import on lyricism.*

I listened to so much instrumental music with my ex. It was a great thing, and the music we listened to as we cooked dinner and played Mancala and Life ranged from Roy Hargrove back to Miles Davis. But during those years, I lost touch with the words.

The day Barry died, I wrote a post (shared on Facebook) about how Erykah Badu totally stole Uncle Barry's bass line for the most popular song on her album. Then the album went platinum because she ripped off MY uncle, who had long since stopped booking gigs and was sitting in a leather chair in an office with a window at Merrill Lynch in New York. His upright sat in the attic with the ghosts and his psychedelic posters from the 70s. It didn't seem fair. She won. He didn't. She's alive. He's not.

And then, even though I'd already heard the song a bajillion times (because secretly my entire family really loves the song and her, but DAMN YOU E. BADU) I listened to her lyrics, and I sat sort of paralyzed, wondering how she knew my uncle so well.

Time to save the world
Where in the world is all the time
So many things I still don't know
So many times I've changed my mind

Guess I was born to make mistakes
But I ain't scared to take the weight
So when I stumble off the path
I know my heart will guide me back

Love is life, and life is free
Take a ride on life with me
Free your mind and find your way
There will be a brighter day

Barry was brave. He was scared. He was broken. He was strong. He was sensitive. He was brilliant. He was quiet and perceptive. He was hilarious. He was the best man I know.

He is the kind of man I am ever-searching for in a partner. He called me Kylie Wiley and knew exactly when to stop, when I would be embarrassed by the nickname in my teenage years. He sent me hilarious birthday cards and told me it was okay to cry. He held my hand when I burst into tears at how much weight he'd lost from the cancer that consumed him. He told me I was special, and somehow it didn't seem cliched, because it wasn't, not coming from him. He told me I am the woman I should be, and that it's good. He told me to trust myself. He stood by me in the light of all of my huge decisions and mistakes and tears and successes, even when I was being stupid and selfish. He smiled, near death, when I told him we had his back.

This is my loss. It's allowed to be. And when my throat closes up on the drive to my piano studio because I see a rabbit or a Jeep or a goddamn traffic light and suddenly remember that my Uncle Barry is dead, I let it. And when I throw up from sheer loss, thinking about how he just wept at the end in that hospital bed, I let my tears blend with the contents of my stomach. And when I panic in the middle of the night because he's just gone, and that I rested my hand on his empty chest and kissed his empty face and wondered aloud where the hell his nose hairs went—is that really a thing that they just shave out?—I let myself panic. Because on the day that we buried him, I stayed behind. I sat in the dirt after some randos in dirty overalls lowered the heart of my family into the ground, after everyone had already gone back to the weird party limo complete with champagne flutes that oddly transported us from the funeral home to the cemetery like this was some kind of prom. I made sure that the prettiest flower was on top of that casket, and I watched over it until my brother's hand on my shoulder pulled me away. And every day for a week before he died, when it mattered just as much as it did when he was healthy, I told Uncle Barry that it was okay.

And when I stumble across old text messages to my best girlfriend like the one I found today from the day of his funeral—

"Facts:
A) Nothing like being an Episcopalian-raised agnostic/secretly-kind-of-white bitch at a Southern Baptist funeral in Harlem.
B) I came very, very close to punching an 8-year-old in the face today.
C) My dad almost ended up in a hotel fist fight with my mom's other brother.
D) I'm pretty sure my uncle has been laid to rest in the Korean section of the cemetery."

—I fucking laugh. And I think he'd have laughed too, but he was never the type to read other people's texts lest he invade their privacy.

God, I love that man. It hurts as much as the loss does, and maybe they're separate and maybe they're kind of not, but I love that man. That's him up there. Open to the sunlight, ever tied to his technology, on a boat with his Merrill Lynch partner, feeling the vibrations of the bass in the floorboards.



*Also, jazz musicians name-drop like a desperate wanna-be actor at a high-end party in LA (it's not mean to say if you've done it yourself...), the difference being that the jazz cats can legitimately rattle off names because they know each musician's riffs intimately. And then if you are not really a jazz cat you just feel like you got dragged to a party where you know absolutely no one and everyone just talks about their super talented famous group of friends that you will never measure up to.