Growing up, I was blessed with a great-uncle named Alan Meyer.  No relation – the surname rather gives that away.  But we called him Uncle Alan and loved him very much.  He could scarcely have been more different from my family and boyhood life: he was cosmopolitan, a graduate of Yale, a successful advertising executive in New York and Dallas, dressed with a sartorial elegance quite strange to us, and he was Jewish.

He was the life-long companion – ‘significant other’ we would say today – of my blood great-uncle, Harry Sivia, brother of my paternal grandmother, and a fine man in his own right.

To my parents’ credit, they were the first to welcome uncles Alan and Harry into our extended family, in the early 1960s, as a same-sex couple, with a warmth and sincerity fully equal to the love and hospitality they offered to everyone else.  To my brothers and I, Alan was no less a part of our family than anyone else who sat at our holiday meal tables and drank whisky and told tales with the other Selden men on the porch on pleasant evenings.

Jewish?  Gay?  We little understood what those meant, and cared even less.  Uncle Alan was our ideal of a gentleman (we loved Harry, too, but brilliant though he was, he was a curmudgeon).  I can only wish to possess half the wit, innate kindness and grace of my uncle Alan.

Today I  finally got around to examining a few of Alan’s personal effects that were left to me after his death.  I found a small book of poems that he and a friend published in April, 1945, while Alan was still serving in the U.S. Army.  He never spoke of the book, and no one in my family knew of it or that he had written poems in his youth.

In his honor, I’ll share of few of the poems here.  The first poem in the book helps me understand how this most gentle man could choose to serve in a violent conflict.  Like the rest of the family which adopted him and loved him as one of us, he was dedicated to “the neverdying struggle to be free.”

THE CAUSE FOR WHICH WE FIGHT

(To My Parents)

If it come to that and in the service                                                                                                Of the cause for which we fight I shall indeed                                                                             Be called to sacrifice my life,                                                                                                              I pray That you will hear these things:

I realize my gift cannot compare                                                                                                    To yours who gave an only son you loved                                                                        (However little merited that love).                                                                                                My gift was negative – I ceased to be,                                                                                          And by that action made my life a whole;                                                                                    But yours was positive: you lost what was.

I loved and honored you above all else,                                                                                      And yet I have not honored you enough,                                                                                  Who built me, made me fit to serve – and loved.                                                                      This do I know, and this do I regret –                                                                                            But anguish nor remorse remake the past!

Know you that fact; I’m gone and that is all;                                                                                Be proud you gave whom country could employ                                                                            In her behalf when she had need of men.                                                                                     Of this you may be sure:                                                                                                                     I served my country and my countrymen –                                                                                 And well I served the cause for which we fight:                                                                           The neverdying struggle to be free.

(AHM, Ft. Monmouth, N.J., Feb., 1943)