We lost another member of the Webb family Sunday morning. My Uncle Don, one of the old man’s two brothers, passed away. Sadly, he was the fourth Webb sibling in the last four years to leave us.
I’m not going to sugarcoat it and say Dad and Uncle Don were close. As far as I know, they had not spoken since their mom’s funeral in 1987. My father wasn’t close to any of his siblings for the last 10 years of his life. It’s not something we talked much about.
What I do know is my father wanted to talk to Uncle Don at the end of his life. One of the few regrets I have about the way my father left this life is that I failed to connect them. I reached out to Uncle Don on Facebook about a week before Dad died, at his request. He wanted to talk to his brother. Unfortunately, Uncle Don didn’t see the message until a few weeks after Dad died on Aug. 5, 2019.
That year, 2019, was a rough one for the Webb clan. First, my Aunt Ginger, who endured an incredibly difficult life, died in her early 60s early that year. Like my Uncle Don, I didn’t really remember my aunt. I hadn’t seen her since 1984, the year my grandfather died at age 64.
Dad and I talked quite a bit about his upbringing in the final months of his life. As much as he enjoyed talking about his crazy life, our discussions and interviews were about me getting to know my father even better than I did. Those conversations are some of my favorite memories of the old man.
As my dad declined in the spring of 2019, we’d often go for walks around his property. On a good day, we’d get three laps in (about a mile) around his land, which was covered heavily by trees and other greenery. I’ve never met someone who enjoyed nature as much as my dad did, and once you knew his story, which included more than a decade in jail, it makes sense.
As we were about to embark on one of those walks in April that year, an Osage County police car pulled into his driveway and parked, with two officers exiting and walking toward the house. Come of find out, my Uncle Wayne, Dad’s youngest brother, had died at age 66.
What I remember about that day is my dad’s reaction. Though they were extremely close for a long time, Dad and Uncle Wayne hadn’t spoken for nearly nine years. I could tell he was surprised and hurt. I sensed regret that they’d lost track of one another.
Perhaps more than anything, it made my father’s own mortality that much more real. He was declining quickly, and our walks were getting shorter and shorter when I visited.
As the end drew near, Dad gave me a short list of people outside of the small community of family and friends he wanted me to contact when he died. When I got the list, I asked him about several people. The answer for most of those names was “No,” with the exception of two names: His friend Jean Anne and Don, who he asked me to get ahold of as soon as I could. Dad died a few days later.
When Uncle Don got back to me a few weeks later, he mentioned that he’d been battling cancer, too. I just shook my head. That awful disease got my grandmother and two Webb brothers. The other brother, my Uncle Wayne, battled throat cancer years earlier.
I suspect one of the reasons Dad wanted my brother and I to spend as much time together as we could/can is that he wasn’t close with this brothers and sisters. He did think of them in the final days of his life, and he had fond memories of growing up with them, even if he did have a difficult childhood.
I hope Dad, Uncle Wayne, Uncle Don and Aunt Ginger have reconnected now, all these years later.