As you go through life and get older, you have to put up with a lot of loss. One thing that you naturally lose over time is your older relatives. Hopefully you won’t lose your younger relatives, because that’s a tragedy. I’ve been pretty lucky in that regard. But I’m now at the point where nature has taken its course with most of my elderly relatives. This morning I found out that my last uncle had passed. My last aunt had died a little more than a year ago. So, no more aunts or uncles, whether by blood or by marriage. The last aunt and uncle that I mention here were both by marriage. But in my family that didn’t matter. They were considered just as good as the blood brothers or sisters of our parents.

Well, to be honest, I wasn’t all that close to the uncle who just died. But that was just as much due to circumstance than to anything else. Whenever I did see him, I always got along with him. The last time I saw him was about 4 or 5 years ago. Well, there won’t be another chance now. And I regret that. One of the nicest things about youth was being able to take people for granted. You figured you’d always bump into the people you knew and liked, sooner or later. Now I’ve reached the age when that doesn’t work anymore.

Whenever someone that I know dies, I try to reflect upon the meaning of life and death. But today I didn’t have much luck with that. My mind has just been a jumble of little things floating in and out of consciousness. One of those things was the door to my uncle’s house. He and my aunt lived there since the late 50’s , but he moved out shortly after she died in 1992. When I was a little kid, the image of that door became etched in my mind. There’s something about the circular windows in it. It didn’t really spook me, but it didn’t make me feel happy either. It just impressed me, for some odd reason. It seems something like a Jungian archetype, some pattern deeply instilled within the mind by eons of nature and time, something you were just born with.

I thought about that door earlier today, but couldn’t attach any cosmic significant to it. It seems as though it reflects an earlier architectural trend, something like art deco and the big band era. Well, my uncle grew up in the 1930’s and was a young dandy in the 1940’s, so I could see how such a design would appeal to him. But that still didn’t explain why it got my attention, since I’m not an art deco or big band aficionado.

Then, later in the day, I read about the lunar eclipse that will be visible over Europe, Africa and the Eastern USA tomorrow evening. Hey, there’s an interesting analogy for the door – three circles – the sun, the earth, and the moon. When they line up as in the door, the moon lies in the shadow of the earth. A lunar eclipse. Hey, eclipses had strong effects on ancient peoples. Modern folk today still like to watch them. The first half of an eclipse makes you think about death – the light being swallowed up by the shadow. But then the second part starts, and the shadow slowly yields back to the light. There’s something metaphysically hopeful about an eclipse. A hint that perhaps the spirit doesn’t really die, despite the lack of objective evidence in that regard.

So, it was interesting timing for my uncle to pass on the day before a lunar eclipse. This is also the last full moon cycle before Easter week. The next full moon will come a few days before the Catholic celebration of Easter – which is just why the Catholics time Easter as they do. They see the full moon as a metaphor for Christ, brightly reflecting the light of the Father to a darkened Earth. (That’s what I read in a Joseph Campbell book, anyway.)

Well, the human mind is known for its powers of confabulation – finding patterns and explanations where none really exist. I.e., retro-fitting an explanation on to a reality without reason. Cognitive psychologists have documented this conclusively. So perhaps I’m just confabulating my initial reactions to my uncle’s death. But still, I refuse to give up on the notion that everyone’s life has some kind of meaning that goes beyond the obvious. I’m just not giving up on that, even if it is unscientific.

So, bye bye Uncle Matt. Perhaps we will, in some unimaginable trans-dimensional fashion, bump into each other again someday. Someday when the shadows are all gone.