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| Wyman Black in Sedgwick, Maine, summer of 1959 |
On this date in 1959, my only uncle died.
I never met him, since I wasn't born until the late 1960's.
He was killed on a rural road in scenic coastal Maine, on the Blue Hill Peninsula, as his motorcycle rounded a curve and apparently lost traction on some gravel. His bike crashed into shrubs, trees, and brush lining the narrow roadway. He wasn't wearing a helmet.
His name was Wyman Black, and he was my mother's younger - and only - brother. Her only sibling, in fact. He would be 74 now; retired, ostensibly, with who knows what kind of family.
Or maybe not. Maybe he would have died earlier from some other tragic turn of events. Who knows? Maybe he would have gone into the military and been killed in Vietnam, for instance. The guessing games about what he might have become turn pointless pretty quickly. He died when he did, and speculating about all the "what if's" is a hollow exercise at best.
When I was born, Mom and Dad gave me his first name as my middle name. For a while, when I was younger, and the notion that one day I'd be married with kids was still within the realm of possibility (pity the poor wife, though, whomever that would have been!), I imagined I'd repeat the honor with my firstborn son. If I had one.
Again, the supposing could have gone in how many different directions! What if we'd only had girls?
Wymanette? Wymanella? Wymanene?
My uncle died doing something he truly enjoyed - riding a motorcycle. How many people get to die while doing something they truly enjoy? Granted, my uncle probably was fully aware that he was crashing, and the pain he likely felt just before he died almost certainly wasn't enjoyable at all. But the peninsula's doctor (who personally rushed him to the hospital in his own car) speculated that his death was relatively quick, and as utterly lovely as summer days usually are in Maine, transitioning from there to Heaven must have been a version of going "from glory to glory," as the saying goes!
Plus, my Uncle Wyman died being well-loved by his family, and well-liked by everybody who knew him in their tight-knit community on the peninsula. How many people die without any enemies, or people who can't stand them?
To honor his memory as a friendly and hardworking teenager, his last seasonal employer, Eunice Utterback, a respected watercolor artist who summered nearby, brought my grandparents one of the pine trees my late uncle had been helping her plant on her property, which ironically, had been owned by our relatives in the late 1700s.
My late uncle was a professing Christ-follower, so when his life ceased here on Earth, we believe it resumed in perfect fullness in Heaven. His family was not wealthy by any stretch of the Western imagination, but my Mom, my uncle, their parents, and their grandparents never knew literal starvation or homelessness. Their lifestyle was simple even by the standards of their day, they had to share a lot, and make do with bare minimums, and learn how to find the brighter side of many dark circumstances. Nevertheless, all things considered, theirs was a remarkably functional and nurturing family, considering (or maybe because of...?) all they had to do without.
The motorcycle my uncle crashed wasn't his personal property; it belonged to an acquaintance of his, and he was taking a test drive with the intent to purchase it. I'm not sure how that all worked out insurance-wise, in the aftermath of reclaiming a vehicle on which somebody else had died. For her part, Mom made sure that my brother and I knew full-well that we were never to ride a motorcycle, at least while she is alive.
I've never asked my brother if he's ever ridden a motorcycle. Actually, he's into planes and helicopters, but those are far safer vehicles than motorcycles. I've never ridden a motorcycle, but not just because of how my uncle died. Frankly, I'm not all that excited about putting my kiester on a leather pillow just above a gasoline-powered engine. The optics of the many ways such a juxtaposition could go awry seem to void whatever pleasures one derives from cycling.
Would my uncle have survived his accident if he was wearing a helmet? Again, that's a tough question to answer, since nobody saw the wreck, or how his body reacted to it. Besides, were motorcycle helmets back then as well-engineered as they are today? And maybe it wasn't his damaged brain that killed him, but a damaged spinal cord, or some other internal organ. No autopsy was performed, since no foul play was involved.
For what it's worth, however, I suspect that wearing a helmet helps give motorcyclists an important measure of safety, and whenever I see a motorcyclist not wearing one, I think about my uncle, and let some of those "what if's" waft through my brain.
But that's not all I do whenever I'm driving about, and see motorcyclists on city streets or a freeway. I also tend to take extra care and give them lots of space.
After all, the person riding it may be somebody else's uncle or aunt.
It's kinda my own little memorial to my late Uncle Wyman.
