MY UNCLE ROBERT

There are many sad sagas that often go untold and as the many decades pass, lives that were lived fade away. 

This is a tragic story and I never knew this until probably 1992, when my older cousin Eileen told me about it and she said it was in the newspapers. 

So shortly after I found out, I went to a branch of the NYC library on West 43rd Street, filled out a slip of paper and requested some back issues of old Brooklyn newspapers about the time that it happened that were on rolls of microfilm. As I scrolled through, I found what I was looking for. I printed a few articles and decades later posted them at my blog.

In about 2015, I went to Mt. Lebanon cemetery and Robert was buried right there with his parents. It said "son."

Robert's sister, my aunt Ruth (Eileen's mother) lived to be 100. When I would visit her at her assisted living home on West End Avenue, The Esplanade, she would often talk of Robert and she said the reporters were "kind." She said it was no accident. She claimed he had many problems and back then his parents did not know how to handle his issues. He fell into great despondency. This must have been a terrible time for the family. It became a secret and there was not one time my mother ever indicated she lost a brother. But an old letter my grandmother wrote in about 1928 spoke of Robert. 

The house in Brooklyn on 82nd Street in which it happened is still there. As a child, I was in that house many times. I have written poems about some of my memories there. It is the house with the light brown door.

This was my uncle Robert.