mat

My uncle died last week.  He was a really amazing man.  My aunt has been collecting stories for a eulogy, and I wrote this up.  I'm posting it here mostly for online back-up purposes, but feel free to read it.  If you know me in real life and have ever wondered why I'm so weird, this might give some perspective.  Also, so no one thinks I've made a mistake, or am being disrespectful, mat preferred his name to be spelled with a lowercase m and one t.

Mat

Mat was the embodiment of everything I love about my family of origin.  Thoughtful intelligence, deep love and strong bonds, adventure and misadventure, epic story telling. Most of all, humor, lots and lots of often dark and inappropriate humor.  Listening to my mom and aunts and uncle tell stories of family dinners with mat’s epic tales of “Dr. Lardo”, breaking the tension and reducing everyone to hysterics, it makes me wonder if mat made us all what we are.  I knew my grandparents as humor loving people with great stories, but I didn’t know them before mat.  Did they make him the way he was, or was he born with the spark that lit this love of laughter in all of us?

Speculation aside, I know mat influenced me, I wanted nothing more than to be just like him.  Sitting on his screened in front porch on a muggy Florida night, looking at the tree frogs stuck to the screens, he began to teach me the basics of his ways.  What started the conversation?  Did I outright ask him how to be shocking in public?  I don’t think so, but maybe, I think it was more of an expression of wanting to be funny like him, so people would be happy around me the way they were with him.  I do remember his response though, and it was completely in line with shocking people in public.  He said, “You don’t have to be that creative, and it doesn’t have to be anything fancy.  Sometimes it can be as simple as picking a quiet moment to walk up behind someone and yell “the devil!”  Because everyone is always worried about the devil, so it will catch them off guard.”  I took his advice and spent a little time in my teenage and young adult years yelling “the devil!” at random passers-by.  Much of that time was spent with his daughter, who knew his ways far better than I and taught me a few more tricks.

I remember at about nine years old, our first family trip to Florida was planned, it would be the first time in conscious memory I met him.  Before we left, we went to visit Bill, who lived much closer so I had seen him often and come to delight in his antics.  During the visit, I told Bill he was my favorite uncle.  To which he replied, “That’s because you haven’t met mat.”  I love both my uncles, but from a child’s perspective, I must admit, Bill was right.  Mat was everything I loved about Bill, but with a certain kind of softness that only comes from being a father.  Of course, the real fun began when mat and Bill were together, especially in public places.  Anytime a group of two or more strangers was in the proximity, they would either work together, or compete at showing each other up to generate confusion, concern, or awkward laughter from those onlookers.  I’m not sure if that was the goal, but it was the result.  Really, they were just performers, free performers, getting attention and giving someone a break from the monotony of life and a story to tell later.  I have a roll of pictures somewhere of mat and Bill in Seattle, on hands and knees behind potted plants in a restaurant, doing handstands on the monorail, and bowing before a department store mannequin, which they had partially undressed and adorned with a cigarette, sunglasses, and a baseball cap.   

Mat was constantly cheating death, finding his thrill of life in the most dangerous of activities.  When he told me his story of crashing his ultralight into the power lines and laying on the ground, watching a live wire chase a dog around, that was the moment I drew two conclusions.  One, mat was determined to live and die, in the most interesting way possible, two, mat was immortal, and nothing would ever kill him.  When we went to visit him at his house in Florida in late summer of 2004, hurricane Charlie cancelled our flight and we got a few extra days with him.  At the same time, tropical storm Bonnie was hammering the gulf coast.  Mat decided, rather than hunkering down, he should take these tourists out to see a real tropical storm, so we made the drive to the gulf coast.  Once we got there, we had lunch at a restaurant on their deck over the gulf, holding up French fries and watching the gulls struggle with the wind to come snatch them from our hands.  Then we found a small public park with a roped off swimming area.  Mat threw off his shirt and dove in, wearing his cut off jean shorts.  I went to follow suit, but being under the impression that not only are the currents a concern during storms, so are sharks, I asked the knowledgeable Floridian, “Hey mat, is it safe?”  To which he replied, “Of course not!”  as he dove under the roped partition, holding his breath for inhuman amounts of time to come up with shells from the depths. 

Mat, behind me and Dave.  This is the only photo of him I have that is digitized, but it's appropriate, as this is that restaurant on the gulf coast during Bonnie. 

So, mat’s death was shocking, but the more I think about it, completely appropriate.  Death is inevitable for all of us, and the timing almost always sucks, but if it had to be his time, at least it was his way.  He got his cancer diagnosis and 2 months to live, and then spent years laughing in the face of those doctors, living just as hard and reckless as ever, just how he liked it.  He died on his motorcycle, and I don’t know for sure, but taking an educated guess, without protective gear and going way too fast.  Lots of people might make judgments of mat for the abandon with which he approached life, but they don’t understand life the way he did.  Mat was a smart guy, philosophical even, I don’t think he did anything without thought and contemplation.  Somewhere he made the choice to live for joy and accept the consequences as they came.  I hope he got all the joy he was looking for out of his life, I know how much he’s brought into mine, and I know I’ve seen that gift many times on the face of anyone who was in the same room with him.