You would hope, and often in vain, that in the end love and forgiveness would overcome anger, and that entire families would sober up from their draining focus on past injuries.   My uncle, a fussy, vain and sometimes difficult man, who operated behind a veneer of chirping mildness, is not going to get off his back again, or open his eyes, or from the looks it, squeeze anyone’s hand.

The damage that makes people selectively monstrous is not easy to undo.  My father, whose selective monstrousness did great damage to each of those he loved the most, as great damage was done to him, believed that people can’t change.  Arguably, he changed at the end when he and I had the luck to revisit the issue one last time as I stood by his death bed.

Few people have this luck, my first cousin certainly won’t.  And so we will never know if my uncle, like his brother, would have spent the last night of his life confessing his many regrets, wishing he could have seen the gradations and colors that make life beautiful, instead of the black and white only that simplifies life into a war that is always lost in the end.