Silas Oscar Sima, 1943-2020

“In Memoriam: My Great-Uncle”

I didn’t think I’d be writing another one of these so soon after the last one, but life goes on, and people pass away. So, as I wrote an obituary piece for my grandfather, William Sima, so too will I be writing a piece for my great-uncle and William’s brother, Silas Sima. Death is weird and emotions can be difficult to process, but I find writing to be a cathartic experience. Hopefully, at least for somebody, reading this will be cathartic, too.

Silas was born on July 24th, 1943, and passed away on March 13th, 2020 after complications following a stroke. Meaning that he was still only 76 when he died. Like I said once before, I think knowing how someone died is important, though this is again a case where it doesn’t shed much light on who Silas was as a person. He was the younger brother to William Sima, and father to Phil and Carmen, both of whom survive him. He was born in Illinois, with his brother, but spent all of the time I knew him in New England, specifically the Boston area.

So far this has read much like a standard obituary, but I don’t want this to just be a newspaper article relating someone’s death. I think it’s important to celebrate someone’s life, and try to tell the more human side of the story. And to that end, I wish I knew more about Silas.

Growing up, he always seemed a mysterious man to me. He lived out east, in the mountains of New England, the land of bears, Boston, and my other grandfather with his house full of birds. The way I remember it, we’d see Silas once every other year or so, or maybe more often if he flew into Chicago to visit, but generally we only saw him when we were out that way in New Hampshire and Maine. And when we went out there, it was always great to see him, especially because he would hike up mountains with us, which, when I was much younger, seemed as impressive as hell for an older man to be doing. Even today, it seems pretty impressive.

He was an outdoorsman, and that’s what I knew him as. Someone who we would hike around with, going up mountain trails and getting ice cream afterwards. At one point, we were in a pretty sizable group, and someone said something funny. I don’t remember what it was, but whatever they said was funny enough that my brother spat ice cream out of his mouth in a fit of laughter, and it got all over Uncle Silas. That memory still makes me chuckle to this day.

And although he was a hiker and explorer, I wish I had known him as a writer. As a writer myself, I would have liked to discuss craft with him, and the various means of publishing. Because, as I found out only a couple days ago, he’s actually a self-published author. And not only that, but also a photographer, artists, and inventor, who, in his own words, held a “variety of occupations: commercial photographer in Boston, taxi driver in NYC, craps dealer in Las Vegas, and other jobs too numerous (or questionable) to mention.” Hell, I didn’t know about any of this. And I don’t know how I missed it, because those would have been fascinating things to talk about. No wonder he was a writer; he had plenty of material.

It seems to me that I’m running a trend of not really getting to know people until it’s too late. I felt that way about my grandfather, and now, posthumously, I feel that way about my great uncle. I wish I could have gotten to know him as a person and as an artist, in addition to someone that I liked hiking with. Maybe that’s just something about life, you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone and all that. I miss him, but I also miss what I could have learned from him, and what I could have talked to him about. But, after a fashion, isn’t that what all nostalgia is?

I don’t know who will read this. I don’t really know what to say. Death is strange, and I have a difficult time expressing my feelings towards others. Generally, when I think about mortality, either my own or someone else’s, I get a kind of numb feeling and I tune out. Maybe that’s from my experiences with suicide and depression, but I think it’s something I’ve always felt. I pack things away and don’t really think about them, and pretend they don’t bother me. It’s probably not a healthy way of coping with grief.

Again, I don’t know who will read this or when. Phil (or Carmen), if you’re reading this, I want to say how I sorry I am for your loss. I miss the man that I never knew, but you must miss the man you knew all too well. My feelings are distant, detached, a piece of family that we saw on vacations and at holidays. And yet I still miss him, because I’ve known him my entire life. I can’t imagine what it must be like to lose a father. I know what it’s like to lose a grandfather. But someone even closer, I have a hard time comprehending. I’m sorry.

I can’t really offer any solace to anybody, I suspect, despite my best intentions. What I can offer is some positive memories and a few snippets about Silas’s life that I do know. There’s the ice cream. There’s hiking around in New England, scaling mountains and picking over rocky shores out on the east coast. As an environmentalist, I admire how frugally he lived. I’m told he rode his bike everywhere, even on vacation. I’m not even sure if he owned a car.

I liked hiking with him. I’m looking forward to reading through the novel that he published. And I’d like to see the photographs he took and the paintings he created. I miss him, and I wish I knew him better. I loved him, like all my family. The world has lost a very kind man, and if the addendum to the description of his novel is anything to go by, the world’s lost an artist, too. I just wish I had realized that sooner.

There’s a quote by Ray Bradbury that comes at the end of Fahrenheit 451 that I really like. I originally intended it for my grandfather, but I think it, fittingly, probably applies to Silas as much as it does to William. They were brothers, after all, and while maybe their trades were different, in some way they were kind of the same. They both made things.

The quote goes like this: “Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you’re there.

It doesn’t matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that’s like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.”

Trying to describe this man, I feel very much like someone looking at a painting through frosted glass. I don’t have a very clear picture of it, but then again maybe I’m not supposed to. It isn’t much my place, after all. I can grieve, everyone is free to grieve as they will. The loss of Silas is as much present in my life as he was in mine, and there’s a hole there now in my heart, a pair of holes, really, my grandfather and his brother. But, be as that may, the loss isn’t mine.

I wouldn’t know from experience, but I get the impression that the loss of a parent belongs, if something like loss can belong, can be possessed, to the children more than anyone else. Perhaps even more so than it belongs to that person’s partner. Maybe that’s why funerals are always so strange to me. I never know what to say, and realistically, there isn’t anything I can say. I can share pictures and pleasant memories and say some prayers, or at least try to. And I can say that I’m sorry for this loss. I’ll miss Silas. He was a really good man, and a great uncle. I love him.