Patrick died this morning after fighting with everything he had; he died of a rare cancer of the liver. He had just turned 37 in June and was a few days short of his first wedding anniversary. Patrick was my father’s great nephew, and Robert Allen, Patrick’s father, was named for my father, his uncle.

When Daddy came home from the war, but before he was discharged, he was in Indianapolis and arrived late one night at his sister’s. Robert Allen remembers waking in the morning and his mother telling him they had company. They were a pair – the uncle and the nephew, the two Roberts; my mother once said, “Your dad took him everywhere.”

This is definitely not the right order of things, but it has happened. Patrick’s wife wrote on his CaringBridge site Patrick is in Heaven. I like to think that when he arrived his grandparents and my dad were there to pull him into their arms. And I can’t help feeling that my dad’s spirit is enveloping his beloved nephew.