My Uncle Joe

My father’s 80th birthday, 2011. Top row, Uncle Joe and my late Aunt Tess. Bottom row, my father and my Aunt Mary.

When I was growing up in a suburb in Central Jersey, we’d take the hour or so drive up the turnpike to visit my paternal grandparents in Jersey City. They lived in the Greenville section on Danforth Avenue.

Part of visiting Nana and Pop Pop was seeing Uncle Joe, who lived with them. I was fascinated by how he was always on the move, would stop to talk with a twinkle in his eye and a smile on his face, and then was in motion again. Even more engaging to us was his uncanny memory around numbers.

If someone in the family had a baby girl, you could turn to Uncle Joe and ask what year she’d make her holy communion or graduate high school and he’d rattle it off in this quick cadence he had. There was no hiding one’s age in our family because if you said you were 39, Uncle Joe would nod, turn, and then on his way out of the room politely say, “You meant 41, right?”

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Uncle Joe, or Joseph Colasurdo, left us last night at age 85. He died of Covid-19 in Jersey City Medical Center. He was my father’s younger brother, one of my grandparents’ six children. Uncle Joe was mentally retarded (the historically accurate term back then), diagnosed at a time when there was stigma attached to it.

Stories of my father’s childhood often include ones where he was fiercely protective of Uncle Joe, going to movies with him, or making him…