I'm taking a couple classes over at Loyola's writing center this fall - fiction and creative nonfiction - and figured I would save the shorter assignments here, as an alternative to flushing all that sweat down the drain (the shorter pieces only get the one readthrough). This one is from the nonfiction class. The teacher asked us to "write about your experience with an 'ism'."

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My uncle, John Harris, died this morning in his sleep. He was 84 years old.

Contextualism (or the epistemological definition anyhow) is "the view that an entity cannot be known without understanding the full context of its connections to other entities". [1]

The relatives I saw often growing up are all on my mother’s side, and still occupy little pockets of New England, from eastern Massachusetts all the way up to central Maine. They are the group of grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins that have, over the years, become my working definition of the word family. John, and his wife Betsey, came to occupy the very core of that definition. They were the oldest, and therefore sat on the uppermost branch of our particular little tree.

To know family as constant and available since birth is to know it with a particular kind of intimacy. I was raised on a healthy dose of stories about John and Betsey, and encouraged to think of their story as part of my own. They were there when I arrived, they checked in on me as I grew up, they cheered me on during graduations, and generally filled the space that grandparents might in other families. We are not as close as some of the other relatives, but not distant, either, and I have come to understand myself as lucky for having been raised even occasionally in their company.

When asked to describe John, my mind begins to sift through the particular words that have been pinned to his name over the years. Aggressive, articulate, educated. Marine, lawyer, sailor. Father, uncle, son-in-law.  Each set comes coupled with a few familiar anecdotes, worn smooth from retelling. In many ways, those words and stories do more to color my understanding of the man than my own experience. This is how context is woven into families, or, perhaps more accurately, how families construct that context, layer by layer, story by story. The discrepancy between the stories that I remember myself and the stories I have been told can often blur, especially after I’ve told those same stories myself a few times.

It is easy to take for granted that you know your family well. It is less easy to admit how very limited that familiarity is; how they can be known in summary only, and, occasionally, stereotype. Marine, lawyer, sailor. Spend enough time staring at words like these, and their meaning erodes until little more is left than what you might find in a dictionary. Uncle. When applied to a man - to a story that you thought you knew - the holes become overwhelming. Each person who knew him as one of those words saw their relationship as a distinct constellation of moments. A smooth progression of plot. Shift from one person to the next, and different patterns can be found in the same stars. Seen this way, a single life becomes an infinity of distant points, shimmering in the distance.

He graduated from Princeton, fought as a marine in the Korean War and drove, until yesterday, a little blue Toyota 4x4 that featured a purple heart on its license plate. He was a lawyer, sailor, and ardent anglophile who revered the works of Anthony Trollope. He fathered two children who in turn produced three children of their own. And that, at least in one telling, is that. On a day like today, when my word - uncle - is reduced to the past tense, the truth of those other contexts, and how much fuller they must be than my own, is for a moment quite clear. Who saw him first when news of the Korean war broke out? Who was standing beside him when that shrapnel hit? Who did he celebrate with upon passing the bar? What was he like as a husband? A father? A son? The question of whom, exactly, the world has lost today is not one that I can answer, though it is comforting to think that on some level, no one can.

To understand that we can never truly know someone fully, no matter how close they may be to us, seems to be a fairly standard psychological waypoint on the road towards adulthood. To accept that coworkers, lovers, friends and family members can only be seen from your single, tremendously limited vantage point, is to further admit that their very identity shifts, whether you like it or not, depending on who is doing the looking.

What is lost, then, cannot be known, only felt, and understood to be a reminder of our role as little points of context in the wider dark we share.