A Eulogy for My Uncle

By Darren Lacsado

Tito Erwin was everyone’s Filipino uncle that had no family or home to go to. The first time I met him was back in 2002. As my Mom and I were walking out of our street’s corner store, he limped out from behind a nearby dumpster and bummed a cigarette from my Mom. He stood tall at a lopsided six foot two, his left leg dragging down the rest of the left side of his lanky body. My mom told me she thought we were getting mugged at first, but he was always a bit of an enigma.  When I used to live there, he was a playground myth to us elementary kids. We’d spend countless recesses trying to guess who he was based on what little information we knew about him. The scar that ran from the top of his forehead down to his chin could make him out to be a convicted serial killer.  The tattooed barbed wires that wrapped around his left arm and the anchor on his right shoulder suggested he was ex-Navy. But his tattered clothes and body odour strongly suggested that he was just your run-of-the-mill homeless man. Who could say? The man was a mystery and he revelled in the fact. No one knew anything about him except that he lived in the neighbourhood before anyone else. Everyone liked him, for the most part. However, that all changed during one particular Thanksgiving. At our annual community potluck, Erwin had too much to drink and bottled my mom with an empty beer glass. When the other adults tried to restrain him, he eventually started to attack them too. It took four police officers to subdue him to get him to calm down. He cried and tried to apologize to everyone, but it was too late. After that day, the community started to ignore him and inevitably left him alone. They found him buried beneath a snowbank behind his dumpster back in November of 2019. He was surrounded by empty Corona bottles and had only a decade-expired ID card and his worn dog tag on him. A broken prosthetic foot lay only a few feet away. H had been dead for at least a week, at least that’s what the coroners said. It didn’t take a genius to surmise that he died alone. Alcohol and cold weather don’t mix well. It turned out he had a family. His older sister flew out from the Philippines and hosted a small funeral for him later that year. I learned a lot about Erwin’s family that day. The spent their childhood in the neighbourhood until their parents died at an early age. Without anyone to support them, they were forced to work to support themselves. His sister decided to return to the Philippines to live with their aunt. Erwin, on the other hand, chose to serve in the Vietnam War. He was honourably discharged before it ended. But he didn’t enlist alone. The dog tag, it turns out, was his brother’s. Well, I’m a psychology major now, on my way towards (hopefully) graduate school to obtain a Master’s in Counselling to become a licensed therapist. Four years too late, sure, but at least now I know. Rest in peace, Tito. I’ll make up for it with a pack of cigarettes the next time I see you.