That message wasn’t meant in any kind of negative or selfish way. To me, it meant to dare to dream, to commit to living on my own terms, to pursue my vision—one that others didn’t have to see, just me.

One of our earliest outings together had been to the Mississippi River, where Uncle Henry taught me to swim and where he’d take me boating whenever good weather came around. There was one day on the river that I remember as the essence of happiness, one of those perfect summer days that stretch on forever. Not a cloud in the sky, there was just the sound and smell of the gas engine, the two of us: Uncle Henry in the back gunning the Evinrude engine, steering us across the river, and me up front with my legs dangling over the side, kicking up the water and throwing spray back into my face. Sensations of well-being ran through my senses: the ups and downs of the small craft skimming over the mellow rolling of waves; the feel and sound of the waves slapping on the bottom of the boat; the spray of mist around me, lovingly touching my face and skin.

That was probably the most dangerous position possible in which to ride inside of a small boat, but that was part of what made it the most daring, spectacular fun I’d ever had. Decades hence I would recall that glorious day while watching Titanic and seeing Leonardo DiCaprio shout, “I’m king of the world!” That was the exact feeling that came over me on the Mississippi with Uncle Henry, a feeling of being completely alive. Uncle Henry had a look of satisfaction as he saw me happy, as if he had done well to set me on a path that he might not always be around to guide me along. Or so I later interpreted our most memorable time spent together.

One night at the end of that first summer I’d stayed with Uncle Willie and Aunt Ella Mae, I had gone to bed but was still awake when I heard my aunt cry out, “Oh, no!” followed by muffled crying from her and my uncle. I sat up in bed in a panic, not only because I had never heard grown-ups cry before, but also because I knew. It was Uncle Henry. No question. The pain was so pronounced it reverberated all the way up to the attic where I slept at the time. I prayed more genuinely than ever before: Dear God, please don’t let it be my Uncle Henry. I didn’t sleep, I prayed and prayed, feeling more powerless than ever to alter whatever it was.

The next morning, at breakfast, my Aunt Ella Mae, her eyes puffy under her cat-eye glasses, said in a somber, strained voice, “Henry had an accident. Yesterday. He drowned.”

Reeling from the shock and sorrow that he was gone and the disbelief that he could have had an accident, because he knew everything and was careful and because he couldn’t be gone, he couldn’t, I barely pieced together the details. Aunt Ella Mae was really talking to me, since the younger kids wouldn’t understand, but I was numb, devastated. In that place of stillness where I went to brace myself against hurt, I pushed away the haze and tried to understand the chronology of what happened. Uncle Henry apparently had gone out to fish from a small island, and the boat had come off its mooring and drifted away from shore. When he attempted to swim out to the boat and bring it back in to redock it, the undercurrent was too strong and took him down.