Part of Uncle Silas always resided in absence, the quiet and the still, his handsome face just off to the side in old photographs, gazing over his shoulder into the distance, or down at the solemn and familiar earth, smiling slightly, as if some joke or pleasantry had been spoken between them. Unlike my father, he took the cure for booze at the clinic in Duluth, telling no one, returning weeks later, clean-shaven and rested, as though he had merely driven to the grocery store and back. When he married, later in life, he didn't bother to inform the family, so averse was he to drawing attention to himself. He worked at the hospital up in Hibbing, learning the secret language of blood through the thumbnail lens of a microscope. He called it a dance. When ALS came to rob him of his touch, and then his speech, his limbs hardening like the branches of a weathered tree, he retreated further. I can see his sturdy frame receding, folding into itself, can see the old black-and-white television flickering, the news already old somehow. I can see the newspapers he could no longer hold stacked up beside him, all those words and faces gone blank, all those stories -- like his own -- waiting to be told.
