Comforter
©2025, George J. Irwin. All rights reserved.

"What is this?" my first wife asked with what sounded to me like a combination of curiosity and disdain, holding up a small comforter. "We don't need this anymore, I don't know why we still have it. It should go in the giveaway pile."

"NO!" I shouted, taking her aback considerably.

"Why? What's so important about..."

"ABSOLUTELY NOT!"

My Uncle Artie was my favorite among the clan on my father's side. He was not a blood relative; he'd come into the family when he married Johanna, one of my father's four older sisters. I didn't know that much about Artie other than he was in the Pacific Theatre in World War II, he worked at the K&E Plant in Hoboken for a number of years, and after that he took a job as a mail carrier in one of the more affluent suburbs of the state, to which he drove his Ford Maverick back and forth each weekday. As the only one in the family other than my father who drove, he was always the one to take his wife and sister in law and whoever else would fit into the Maverick down to our house for holidays. We, meanwhile, were the only ones on my father's side of the family with a house. So we often hosted these gatherings, especially after Grandpa—my father's father—passed away.

The most important thing I knew about Artie is that, to use the more current parlance, he "got me." Somehow he related to me on a level that my other relatives did not. When I was younger and a nascent coin collector who could only afford inexpensive examples from "bargain bins" at shows my father would occasionally take me to, he gave me his Twentieth Century Type Set, complete with folder. Later, he sensed that I wanted to be treated like the young adult I was growing into, no matter how haphazard and awkward that journey was proving to be.

Maybe it was because despite being a child of the 1920s, he was a fan of current popular music. He understood that the whistles in the huge Donna Summer hit song "Bad Girls" were "the cops coming" to arrest or at least chase away the Ladies of the Evening—before I understood this, actually. And he loved the soundtrack of Saturday Night Fever, especially the song "More Than A Woman," which is sometimes how he referred to his bride. He was also a big fan of the Christopher Cross song "Sailing" which had recently been a number one single. This was all in contrast to my father, who generally was not a fan of most popular music and certainly did not listen to Top 40 Radio Stations the way Artie obviously did.

It was our annual Thanksgiving Gathering, the weekend before the actual holiday, which was late that year. Artie, Johanna, Aunt Susie, and others were there besides the four of us. I don't remember exactly who attended beyond that. The family had been dwindling. It had been a tough couple of years for funerals; though it wasn't really like this, it seemed like every time we'd just returned home from a wake or burial one we got a call that another relative had passed away. The latest was Artie's own mother Rose, just two months before. Unlike the usual serious-minded and conservative repast, the post-funeral gathering after Rose had been put to rest was a blowout down in the basement of one of my father's cousin's houses. Just about every adult got drunk. There was a raucous game of billiards. Uncle Artie had the line of the day, delivered with a slight slur brought on by more than just a bit too much alcohol: "You play dirty pool, sir."

Needless to say, the Thanksgiving Dinner and following dessert at our house wasn't anything like that. My parents simply would not have allowed it. There may have been a little bit of wine with the traditional turkey dinner, and my mother made her traditional Irish Coffee Pie, which had a lot less whiskey in it than Mom intimated. But that was it.

After dinner, my father brought out the slide projector and showed images of the family, as was his tradition. Then we sat in the living room and talked about a lot of things, including, to my delight and my father's indifference at best, the latest hit songs.

Suddenly Artie, who was sitting next to his wife on the couch, complained that he felt very cold. That didn't make sense since the thermostat was set where my mother wanted it and it was quite warm in the house, and there were extra bodies giving off incremental heat in the living room. But Artie was cold, looked cold, and Johanna said he felt cold. My mother immediately decided that he must have been coming down with something. She went into my parents' bedroom and returned with a brown, yellow and black piece of bedding: a comforter of sorts that could be zipped up into a sleeping bag. Artie was helped from the couch to a matching chair, and my mother and Johanna tucked the comforter around him.

I went up to my room for something or other. We lived in a split-level house with just a straight set of six stairs between floors. As I emerged to return to the gathering, from the top of the steps where our bedrooms were, I could see across the living room to where Artie was seated.

I looked down at him, wrapped in the comforter, shivering.

Without warning, a massive wave of dread swept over me.

This wasn't a cold, I heard myself think.

Something was terribly wrong.

I felt like the blood had been drained from me. I had to grab the banister to keep from passing out.

The intense feeling lasted for just a few moments, but it seemed like hours. I had no idea what to make of it. I regained most of my composure, but for the rest of the gathering, I could not help but feel that something terrible was about to happen. I couldn't explain it, and there was no way I could say anything to anyone else, lest I get the lecture about how it was all in my head and I needed to stop telling stories and be practical.

A couple of hours later, Artie said he felt better, my mother felt his head and pronounced that he didn't seem to have a fever, and he and the other guests prepared to depart. The feeling inside me returned. Something was wrong. I still didn't say anything. We said our goodbyes, probably until Christmastime which would bring the next family get together as long as the weather cooperated. I went outside and watched Artie pull away, then went back in and up to my room. He was well enough to drive home, I reassured myself, although there was no one else that could have been behind the wheel because he was the only one with a driver's license. Yes, it would all be fine, it was all in your head.

After the cleanup, my mother announced that it was a School Night, and therefore it was Bedtime. Never mind that I was already set with the next day's assignments and was well into my fourth year of the High School Routine. I wasn't going to argue anyway; the wave of dread that had just about knocked me down the stairs to the living room had left me exhausted. But sleep did not come for quite a while. I had my radio on, but there was not much to listen to on a Sunday night. If I put the television on I would have been told immediately to turn it off and go to bed, right now this minute. Finally, though, I managed to fall asleep.

My father's job as a high level manager in the Systems and Programming Manager came with the responsibility of calling people into work at any hour of the night if a computer job "bombed" and needed to be attended to—particularly if it was the payroll job, which meant that tens of thousands of people all up and down the East Coast wouldn't be paid on time unless the "abend" – Abnormal End of Job—was fixed and restarted. So it was not unusual for my father to get a call in the middle of the night, after which he got out the phone list that he kept and started rousing other people to get into the office and figure out what had happened. Despite being a light sleeper, I sometimes did manage to be unaware of these calls.

But when the phone rang in the middle of the night, I knew why.

I knew what had happened.

Artie was gone.

My mother, who had answered the phone, confirmed it: "OH MY GOD. OH MY GOD. OH MY GOD."

Artie had died in his sleep next to his wife, who made the gruesome discovery just before she called the police and then us. We were told later that the cause was a massive heart attack.

These days, there has been a lot more communication about the warning signs of cardiac failure. I wouldn't have known that Artie was exhibiting at least one of them, and probably others that he didn't relate or didn't choose to relate or didn't know that he should relate. Even if I had recognized the signs, no one was going to pay attention to me; after all, Children Should Be Seen And Not Heard, even if they were Seniors in High School. There was nothing I could have done to heed the warning that I had apparently been given. No, that didn't make any sense either. This wasn't some bad television show about the occult, I told myself. But then, how did I know what had happened before my mother even picked up the phone call in the middle of the night? Was it an uninformed, unlucky guess, training in journalism from my time on the high school newspaper, or something else?

The morning, the week, the months after Artie's death were a blur for me. By far this was the hardest funeral yet in my young life, the climax, if you will, of a parade of burials that had taken place over the past few years. The repast for Artie was not anything like the one for his mother Rose two months before. No drunkenness, no dirty pool one-liners. And during the wake, more than one of the mourners recalled that Rose, who had been sick for some time before her passing, had said aloud to people that she was taking her only child with her. I didn't know what to do with that information.

I was wrapped up in my own grief, just as Artie had been wrapped in that comforter, and it didn't loosen its grip until well into the next year. Artie was my favorite uncle, the one who got me, the one I could talk to, the one I shared music with, and now he was gone. Any time I heard the song "Sailing" I fought not to cry. I couldn't always hold it in. Years later, the song could still have that effect on me, including when I heard Christopher Cross sing it live at a show in town. I don't think anyone noticed my tears as Christopher sang about peace and tranquility and how soon he would be free, and I was in the middle of the audience with Colleen holding my hand.

After high school, though, there were life events that had a common thread. First, there was the birthday of my first girlfriend, which I never got to celebrate with her because our relationship didn't last that long-- though I will always remember her kindness in celebrating my birthday and I still have her gift, a brass Pegasus that is still in my collection. Then, there was the night I met my second serious girlfriend, years after the first girlfriend and I had parted ways. That, let's just say, didn't last either. Two years to the day after that events were set into motion that led to my meeting my first wife.

All of these events—birthday, chance meeting, plan set in motion, took place... on what was Artie's birthday.

There are those of us who dismiss such things as coincidences, and there are those of us who don't believe that anything is a coincidence.

When I moved out of the house in which the Thanksgiving gathering that was the last time we saw Artie alive took place, I took the comforter with me. It had been stored back in the closet and probably not used since that fateful day. No one including my mother made any fuss about this but I was prepared to put up a fight to keep it with me. Perhaps they didn't remember why, or want to remember, but I did. It's been with me ever since.

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