Saturday, June 21, 2025
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This Saturday I traveled to the suburbs of Philadelphia to pay homage to kindred who embodied a family man. A weekend to say auf Wiedersehen to the guy that kept my engine running when I needed him most. A saint, a superhero, a fighter, a staunch man, an unwavering man, the ultimate listener, the most generous person I ever met, the most humorous member of the Tickel family I ever knew and most of all a man that loved me unconditionally like the Son of Man.
If he didn’t rally to me and come to my side when my Dad perished I would have been spinning. If he didn’t come to my bedside when I leaped out of that window I might have called it quits in that ICU.
When I was laying there in a body sling and a breathing tube keeping me calmly breathing he kept it together. He never showed me defeat. He didn’t leave any doubt in my mind that I was getting out of that hospital in Baltimore. He sat down next to me and told story after story. He was one of the few people visiting me that believed. He believed I was going to make it. He believed that I was alert and that I was conscious to pick up what everyone in the room was saying.
When I got the breathing tube out of my throat, I was very mucked up from having it for nearly two weeks. Almost instantaneously as I was sitting up in a wheelchair I involuntarily hurled a ginormous loogie across the room that nearly landed on him. Instead it splattered with oomph on the middle of the blank hospital floor. It was really easy to see and spot. One of my brothers was in the room. I looked at both of them not knowing how to react. No one had ever briefed how to handle the room in this situation. He stared me down like, what do you expect from me? I’m not wiping it up. Either was I, I was relegated to a wheel chair.
Then without skipping a beat, he took the heat off me. He shared a story with parallels. He once led a business meeting in a conference room that had one of those long tables for 20-30 businessmen to sit at long ways. In the middle of his presentation he had a colossal slip-up for the record books. As he was talking a bougie came up and flung from his mouth to the table, splat. He’s old school. He’s from a time when men left the house with three things: house and business keys, a money clip with an ID, credit card and physical dollar bills and last but certainly not least — a hanker-chief. Well, he swiped away that salvia in one fell swoop with his personal rag. He kept talking like it never happened. Man, if I could have been a fly on the wall that day. That sounds like the best spectacle. That was uncle Dave through and through. Roll with the punches and never ever waver in confidence and focus when on a mission. He got it done. All his life he got it done. He was a champ. He was the Tickel’s family champ. I miss him dearly.
