My Uncle David died yesterday. This is one of only two photos I have of him here -- it's from a visit almost a decade ago. Right now I'm in the first American stage of mourning -- travel arrangements.

Since I found out about his grim prognosis early this week, I've been trying to think of concrete times with him but I can't. What I remember is a kind, funny man who always made me feel at home and comfortable wherever and whenever. The last time I saw him he was in the hospital and we all (including my children) carried on as if we were hanging out in my grandparents' living room. He joked. He kidded with the kids. And he made me remember why I always admired him.

He was a priest when he married into our family, and as family lore goes, he still considered himself one even after the church turned its back on him for that sin. I always respected him for this -- loving and believing in something so much that you want to help it change and adapt to the here and now. It also somehow moved me that he had pictures of Martin Luther King Jr. and John F. Kennedy hanging in his office.

His intelligent, Vonnegutian humor was pepper to the salt of our populist, sometimes-blue family humor. And he published a book in the '80s about organizer Sal Alinsky, which impressed both the literary and liberal sides in me. In my formative teens, he and his wife (my aunt) seemed to be the vanguard of the new America launched by the '60s -- he a stay-at-home intellectual and she a career journalist at a time when there were no women publishers, let alone media execs.

In the mid-90s, a series of familial deaths included several grandparents, my mother and even my last cat. Those events shaped and guided where I am now, and I remember Uncle David offering calm, reassuring words -- and a smile. I assumed he learned this in priest school but it now occurs to me this doesn't give him enough credit. Getting through those previous deaths doesn't mean that I'm able to better handle his passing, it just means I at least know how powerful and lasting the memories will be. Good-bye Uncle David. And thank you.