a sad end?

So on Sunday night as we were making our way home from visiting my parents, my wife found out that her Uncle Omar had died.

Omar had lived by himself in a small house on Long Island, a modest home that he had shared with his parents for many years before they had died. No one had heard from him in a few weeks, so my mother-in-law—Omar’s sister and last living immediate family member—called the police and asked them to check on him. (My in-laws live in Massachusetts.) The police found Omar’s body on his kitchen floor; it appeared that he had died a few days earlier.

“A sad end,” my wife said, adding that although she was dismayed by the news, it wasn’t all that much of a surprise. Omar had long struggled with an assortment of issues, physical and psychological, and recently had increasingly isolated himself from the family.

Truth be told, he was never quite the same after his brother died of ALS back in 1999, and once his parents passed a few years later, followed by a lay off from his longtime job, what was already a fragile psyche was pretty much shattered.

I always found Uncle Omar to be an eccentric and somewhat neurotic character. Although he seemed to be a bit of a grouse at times, and certainly had interpersonal issues, he was a gentle soul, and certainly loved to laugh. If it wasn’t for his height—he was about 6’5—you probably wouldn’t notice him at all, which is how he seemed to prefer it. I’m pretty sure he was never really comfortable in that body. Or in life, in general.

Omar suffered from a bit of agoraphobia, so to get him to show up for family events was always a challenge—he might arrive at the last minute, hang around the edges of the action, and then dash out early “to beat the traffic.” He had emigrated to the United States from Argentina as a teenager, and I always wondered if being thrown into such a radical new culture and having to learn a new language during what probably were already awkward teenage years, had retarded his social development a bit.

Omar was also a confirmed bachelor, and I don’t mean that in any other way than that he was probably not emotionally or psychologically strong enough to survive any sort of long-term romantic relationship. He certainly liked kids—he was always very kind to my sons (from a comfortable distance) when he saw them, and he doted on my wife’s brother, who was his only nephew. But I don’t think he ever wanted any family of his own other than the parents, siblings, nieces and nephew that he already had. That seemed to be just about enough for him. Maybe too much at times.

Of course, being the jerk that I am, I always liked to have some fun at Omar’s expense, nearly perfecting a shallow imitation of the man that involved weakly mimicking his Argentine accent and saying occasionally inappropriate things as he was wont to do. Yeah, it was just as disrespectful as you’re imagining—fortunately, I never did it in front of him, although I think he might’ve got a laugh out of it. Hard to tell which way he might go sometimes; emotionally, he could easily startle and bolt, like a nervous deer drinking at pond.

But as I think about Uncle Omar’s passing, I keep coming back to my wife’s comment about “a sad ending.”

Omar died alone in a house that, although it was his home, was a long way from his beloved Argentina. The coroner said that in addition to other health problems, he also was suffering from lung cancer, so I tend to think his final months were probably somewhat painful.

Yes, it’s sad to us that he passed away alone like that, a very sick and ostensibly broken man. But ultimately, he was an adult, and in his own, arguably weird way, he made his own decisions. He got to choose his own end, even if it was one that many of us wouldn’t pick. Sure, it seems sad to us—but it’s a luxury that many people don’t get.

Sure, if he had reached out, steps could’ve been taken to ease his pain and make him more comfortable. But for someone who never really was going to be comfortable in life under any circumstances, being able to die on his own terms may have been as close as he could get to peace. Which may not be so sad after all.