It's What You Do, Not What You Say: Requiem For Uncle Satch

My Uncle Satch was the least politically correct person I've ever known.

Racial and ethnic epithets (of all varieties) as well as George Carlin's Seven Dirty Words tripped off his tongue with cringe-worthy ease. He refused to mince words (no matter how much anyone pleaded with him to occasionally use discretion.)

Uncle Satch was bellicose and bossy, opinionated and stubborn, aggravating and immovable. And he also was one of my favorite people in the world.

Last month, when Barack Obama gave his speech on race in the wake of what Satch would have called "a shitstorm" about some racially-charged rhetoric used by his pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, I couldn't help but think of my uncle.

Of Wright, who the senator considers "family," Obama said:

"He contains within him the contradictions -- the good and the bad -- of the community that he has served diligently for so many years. . . .

"I can no more disown him than I can disown my white grandmother -- a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed her by on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe."

I would no more make apologies for who Uncle Satch was and the way he lived his life -- the good, the bad, and the really ugly -- than I would make excuses for loving him. And I did. Desperately.

My uncle, Francis Benjamin "Satch" Page, Jr., the patriarch of the Irish side of my family, died earlier this month in Connecticut, where he was born and bred. Despite a number of ailments that had been trying to kill him for some years -- a few of us affectionately referred to him as "the cockroach" because it seemed like nothing would ever get him and he'd live forever -- his heart just gave out. He went quickly and peacefully at the age of 76, joking with hospital staff almost to the end. Just the way he had wanted to go.

Uncle Satch was a real piece of work -- the quintessential Irishman with a big red face, loudhailer voice, shock of white hair, bawdy laugh, fiery temper and wicked sense of humor. Straight out of Central Casting's Paddy files.

Satch also was a milk man, a Jets fan, an avid bowler and golfer, a world-class cartoonist, proud Army veteran who served during the Korean Conflict, a firefighter of 40 years, and a triumphantly sober alcoholic (27 years.)

He read the papers religiously, in his case the New York Daily News and the Stamford Advocate. But if he had lived in Chicago instead of outside New York City, I'm certain he would have been a Sun-Times fan.

He did the crossword -- in pen -- every day, including the day he died when the answer to 20 Across was "SEE THE LIGHT."

Words are important. As a writer I know this all too well. Words can elevate and relegate. They can lift the spirit and leave emotional wounds that never heal.

But words are not the most important thing in this life. We should be judged by how we live, how we love (or hate), and not only by what we say.

If my uncle had been judged solely by the blue streak that sometimes came out of his mouth, he would have been short-changed.

As I looked around at the crowd gathered for his funeral mass, I knew that many people saw through the coarse language to the life of a man who was incredibly generous, thoughtful, compassionate, loving, selfless and yes, kind. He had a lot of help through the rough patches of his life and he never forgot. He paid it forward. He was immensely grateful.

And for all his bluster and bigoted vocabulary, my uncle was far from judgmental. He would never condemn someone for a weakness, physical or otherwise. He took people for exactly who and what they were and loved them for it.

More than any words, that is his legacy.