Uncle Willie died in a way that would have made him laugh just as heartily, had he been capable of it. One Sunday, at our house for lunch, he just slumped at the table, as if suddenly dropping off to sleep. He had suffered a ruptured aortic aneurysm, something that strikes without warning – a mercifully instantaneous death for him but a brutal shock for my rather emotional and sensitive mother. One moment he was his usual jolly self and the next he was gone. Unfortunately for Uncle Willie, and for my mother’s tablecloth, he collapsed rather inelegantly, face first, into his bowl of Heinz
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