The first books I read as a kid were the Harry Potter series (yes, I know, I’m a walking cliché). I also eventually read a lot of Verne and some Dickens, but I had to ease into it. As I was reading the fourth Potter book, my uncle found out about the fact that I enjoyed these books. He was impressed and pleased that a ten year old would enjoy reading at all. The next time I saw him, he began calling me “Cervantes”.

My uncle, William, was a stern man. As a kid I was always nervous to be around him. He looked as if he always had something important on his mind, with his thick, red mustache and that wheelchair of his, there always seemed to be an air of elegance and decisiveness to everything he did. Even when we had to carry him up or down some stairs, there was always a sense of gravitas and dignity that he conducted himself with that was admirable. He was always very direct and did not joke much; at least not that I can remember from those days. Even his house was intimidating; it was usually almost empty, there was an unnerving feeling to me every time I went there because it was usually just him and the people that worked there (he was twice divorced and my cousins had long moved out).

When my Junior year of high school arrived, along came the conversations of what my career was going to be. It was that time when all the grown ups would repeatedly ask me what I planned to do with my life. Now I am from a family where anything that is not somehow tangentially related to engineering or scientific in any way, then it’s incomprehensible. I had a skill for math and physics, so it seemed like the logical choice to me that engineering was my future. A career path involving writing did not even cross my mind, I did not even consider it an option. When my uncle found out about my inclinations, he was conflicted. One of the universities I was considering was the Rochester Polytechnic Institute, his alma mater. He was an engineer too, but he insisted that I had to do something related with writing. I could see in his face that he was disappointed that I was not the one who would accompany him down a more artistic path. Also, I wasn’t reading much at that point either.

Around that time, he had become more and more involved with art, he collected a lot of pieces which were displayed all around his house. I particularly remember a shirt that had a face doodled by Picasso. From time to time, he would even foster artists that he deemed “up and coming”, and would bring them around to family events which always resulted in awkward yet hilarious situations. There was one Christmas when he tried to pitch us paintings by one of these guys with the artist in the same room with us. It was a painful 20 minutes of staring at these paintings with some odd textures and parts that were coming out of it. I gleefully watched as everyone tried to be polite and compliment the pieces. Sometimes I didn’t necessarily like these artists, but I grew to respect my uncle for this. He didn’t care if anyone agreed, it was his passion and it was something that always seemed to fulfill him.

I began college in the Fall of 2009, and by the end of my sophomore year, I had gone through an existential crisis. Electrical Engineering (EE) was frustrating me, I despised every single class I had, and I was repeating every single core course within it (my way of saying I was failing every single EE class). I realized that this was not for me, but I was already halfway through college and I did not want to transfer and begin with a completely different major (also there wasn’t anyway my parents could afford me starting over). I decided to suck it up, so I chose the least objectionable major, and I ended up in Industrial Engineering which I ended up enjoying.

At this point I had began to also love writing, which coincided with an email from my uncle. He had contacted me to see how I was doing because my parents had told him about my change in majors and my rekindling with literature. He was preoccupied, but oh so obviously happy. I had also signed up for a creative writing class to see if this was something I really enjoyed and not some phase I was going through. My uncle asked if I would send him what I wrote and thus my first and only fan was created. We began corresponding back and forth and sometimes not even about my writing. I remember he once sent me just a picture of a naked Pamela Anderson; it didn’t have a subject or any text in the body, just the picture. I remember not knowing what to reply, so I didn’t. After a week or so, another email arrived where he wrote: “don’t you know who what is? It’s Pamela Anderson!” I laughed so much with those emails. It was one of those moments where I realized there’s no such things as adults. If a man as serious and curmudgeonly as him was capable of something as silly, then I had something to look forward to.

Two years later, summer of 2013, I was working as an intern at an engineering firm. My phone starts buzzing. My family’s 40 person WhatsApp group is having an active day. I see messages asking information regarding a car crash involving two of my uncles. The brakes on their van had failed. William died on impact. Carlos was being rushed to the hospital. He died within hours of arrival to the ER. The next couple of days I saw as people mourned them. It was the biggest loss I have experienced. I went through such a confusing range of emotions that I never knew were possible until that day.

My uncle Carlos even though he was not mentioned above is greatly missed but for very different reasons. For a while I felt guilty that I didn’t have many recent memories of him. After a while I realized that it was mostly that my memories of him weren’t as recent. He was such a force of warmth and silliness. Every time I saw him he had a way of being upbeat and infecting others with his great presence. As a kid I loved whenever I saw him, he had this neat trick where he would wiggle his ear which both freaked me out and delighted me.

During the days that followed, they were both referred to as great fathers, friends, uncles, brothers, but no one could understand what they both meant to me. Whenever I spoke to someone who was close to William, and they would find out who I was, they would project a warm yet sad smile and would talk about how excited he always was when he talked about me. It was as if I was one of the artists he would love promoting.

As I sit here a year after their death I realize a few things. My uncle was my only audience for a while, and in some ways, he still is. Every time I write, I think of him even if just in passing. Now I’m not going to pretend like he is the main reason I write, but he is definitely a big part of why I want to keep doing it. One thing I learned from the few years that I started to get to know him was to write for me. Write because it makes me feel, and never because it might appeal to someone else.