August 5, 2025 • 41 mins
Tying the ideas and events from the previous episodes together, hear the full story of Uncle Chris’ life. Ian sits down with his Mom to talk about her little brother and the fate of their Panamanian family, making a fitting tribute to the one and only Uncle Chris.
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Speaker 1 (00:13):
Hey there, welcome back. Here's my friend Bill again.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
Did Turner talk to you about loll our buddy?
Speaker 1 (00:19):
That's past way. No, I just loved him. He was
an old scoundrel.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
So we had a memorial for him a couple of
weeks ago, and some of his families there a lot
of them, aren't You could tell that as beloved as
Lowell was by his chosen family, family life was very
different with Lowell. It was like, I know you're a scoundrel,
and your.
Speaker 1 (00:41):
Memorial proved that.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
You know, like I can tell that your family life
was complicated and I don't know the ins and outs
of it. But I loved him because with so many
people like that, they're larger than life. They kind of
feel like movie characters. They're why out and it's only
until you have to be close to them that it
(01:04):
I guess if you have to be family, you know,
because I grew to be quite close with a little
but like when you're responsible for them, for family that
can be tougher, you probably don't look at them quite
like quite like a fun pirate to have around.
Speaker 1 (01:21):
This is the final episode of the podcast, and here
to help me set it up are Bill and Turner,
the two brothers that are filmmakers currently based in New Orleans.
Here's Bill again.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
My uncle's a wild guy, but like not with like
drugs and guns and stuff. But whenever he would come
over for like holidays, my mom be like, oh God,
and me and turn be like yes, because he was like,
he was an incredible storyteller and he like he would
take us out to bars to watch like WrestleMania, and
(01:53):
it was fucking fun.
Speaker 1 (01:55):
You know. My uncle likes to say.
Speaker 2 (01:57):
Like you should always be around notable all stars and luminaries.
You should be able to judge who is who and
what is what. Growing up, I feel like I was
always around like characters, some of them good, some of
them bad. But you know, there was always sort of
this like spectrum of folks and here's Turner.
Speaker 3 (02:19):
When we were growing up, there were pariahs in town
who I always thought were so fascinating, And we had
a shame billboard for people who got arrested for certain things.
They just put your name up on a billboard. One
of my buddies growing up, we were real good friends
and had a good time, had good sweet, innocent time
and also got into a lot of trouble and things
(02:40):
worked out in my favor and things didn't work out
in his. And he's spent a life in prison, and
for years we'd keep a correspondence and he was, you know,
he's he's a fucking outlaw.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
He's not.
Speaker 3 (02:56):
He's a lot of things, but he probably belongs where
he is. But he's also a sweet human being that
I know just wanted to try and just wanted to
be loved, but just didn't have a good shake of it,
and so adapted to the world that he had to.
And I think whether you come from a shit place
or you end up in one, you have to adapt.
(03:16):
And sometimes that takes its toll. And people get discarded
because of their perceived flaws, and it doesn't mean they're
inherently bad.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
They're people.
Speaker 3 (03:25):
They have a story and there's probably a reason for it,
and it's more interesting for me to try to understand
that than to just discard it.
Speaker 1 (03:36):
This final episode is going to focus on my uncle
Chris's life. So far, I've portrayed him as a bit
of a cartoon character, a gun toting redneck with a
big old mullet, but that's not entirely my fault. One
might argue that that's exactly what he was going for.
All of us tend to choose how we present ourselves
to the world through our clothing choices, facial hairstyles, whether
(03:59):
or not the brim of a hat is curved or straight,
the types of frames you have for your glasses, the
cars we drive, the music we like, even the podcasts
we listen to. These are all choices that we make
for ourselves, but like it or not, they also broadcast
to the people around us who we are, or at
least who we're trying to be. For my uncle Chris,
(04:21):
I think he knew exactly what he was putting out there.
Without touching politics, I think it's pretty safe to point
out that we've been living in a time where it's
becoming easier and more acceptable to write off an entire
person based on superficial characteristics. Almost everything is coded at
this point. Choice of words, clothing, even haircuts can immediately
(04:42):
put any of us on either side of the cultural binary,
one side or the other, embraced or disgraced, good or bad,
And a lot of times you know good or bad
is different depending on which side you fall on. I
can't think of anyone it would be easier to apply
this type of superficial judgment to more than my uncle Chris.
He looked like a stereotype. If I say, redneck or
(05:06):
conspiracy theorist or gun nut, the character that pops into
most people's minds probably looks just like him. And for
a lot of people, that would be a green light
to just write him off entirely, disregard him as a person,
maybe even consider him to be a problem. But he
was a person, and he lived a very hard life,
(05:27):
and he had his reasons for being the way he was.
And I'm very grateful that I got to grow up
knowing someone like my uncle Chris, because knowing him helped
me understand how important it is to not write people off,
to try to understand and appreciate who they are and
what they've been through, because a lot of times that
might give you an idea of what it is they're
(05:49):
actually trying to do. But that being said, they don't
always make it easy. Here's me and my mom. I
remember he would come to our house Virginia. He would
smoke a pipe outside on the deck.
Speaker 4 (06:03):
That's right, he was not allowed to smoke in my house.
Speaker 1 (06:05):
I remember he would watch Clint Eastwood movies inside the house,
and I remember at some point him showing me how
to clean a pistol, so I must have been five
years old, and I remember being in the garage and
Uncle Chris showing me it must have been like a Bretta,
some type of handgun, and him taking it apart to
clean it, and I remember him having the brush and
all the stuff and he's in the oil, and then
(06:26):
him putting it all together and letting me hold it.
And then at some point you coming out and seeing
me holding a gun and yelling at Chris.
Speaker 4 (06:34):
I have no memory of that, but it wouldn't surprise me. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (06:37):
The other one is there was some Christmas. I just
remember him saying how old are you? And I said ten,
and he said, well, I didn't get you at present
this year, but tell you what, when you're sixteen, I'll
take you to a strip club.
Speaker 4 (06:49):
That sounds about right.
Speaker 1 (06:50):
And I remember turning sixteen and wishing I had his number, but.
Speaker 5 (06:58):
Sad but probably true.
Speaker 1 (07:00):
Man, I wish i'd go Chris hung out work. The
last one is when we spent a day with him
in Charleston, and I remember seeing his trailer for the
first time, then with the Confederate flags for window curtains.
But I remember we're in line at subway and I
saw he had a leather fanny pack and I said, oh,
(07:20):
what's what you got in the fanny pack? And he
said protection. He just done zips it and pulls out
a revolver, just in line at subway.
Speaker 5 (07:28):
Now you explained to me how I came from these
people's That's what just floors me.
Speaker 1 (07:33):
There's like a sweetness to him, a niceness where even
though he was scary and mean and rugged and drunk
like all this stuff, there was just still something about. Yeah,
there's a kindness.
Speaker 5 (07:46):
He kind of built this persona that he was trying
to fill in.
Speaker 4 (07:50):
Yeah, but he always had that.
Speaker 1 (07:51):
Sweetheart and he couldn't hide it. And I think that's
the that's why I always liked him.
Speaker 4 (07:56):
Everybody, Yeah, everyone liked it.
Speaker 5 (07:58):
He exasperated the hell out of but I loved him.
There was one year where he showed up with all
these stuffed animals and he had them all talking to you.
I knew he didn't have any money, so I thought
he stole.
Speaker 4 (08:11):
To be honest, but he had the.
Speaker 5 (08:13):
Stuffed animals and he was playing with you.
Speaker 4 (08:15):
And you were just a little guy, and you loved it.
Speaker 1 (08:19):
After I turned ten years old, I only ever saw
Uncle Chris three more times, and I only spoke to
him on the phone once or twice. So much of
my fondness for him comes from when I was really
young growing up in Virginia. He lived nearby and was
always around for holidays and joined us on Christmas. This
is a clip from an old VHS tape I found
Christmas morning nineteen eighty eight. I was four years old,
(08:40):
and he gave me a stuffed Tasmanian devil.
Speaker 6 (08:44):
What is it? Ian Tasmanian Devil?
Speaker 5 (08:48):
I got bucked Bunny and Sevesta.
Speaker 6 (08:51):
Oh here he.
Speaker 1 (08:55):
Is opening a gift for my grandparents.
Speaker 7 (08:57):
All right, ry combat boots, Yeah, buddy, this is what
I've been wanting for a while.
Speaker 6 (09:02):
I got me a pair already.
Speaker 1 (09:03):
But this is another style. I wish I had more
footage with good audio and a lot of these home movies,
he's sitting there quietly in the background, occasionally chiming in,
but it's hard to understand. I was able to find
this clip though, from a family reunion in two thousand
and two, where he's telling a story about when he
worked as a landscaper.
Speaker 7 (09:25):
You know. Ken sent me out to do an estimate, right,
and so I figured out how much it would cost.
Speaker 1 (09:30):
You can do this, do that that, do this?
Speaker 6 (09:32):
And this is a tree about.
Speaker 7 (09:34):
To eventually fall over a house.
Speaker 8 (09:36):
Count the costs it would be for crane, how many
helpers I needed at least three groundsman, two climbers.
Speaker 1 (09:43):
And all this and all that. And I want ahead
and did my figuring, wrote up the price in their doctors.
Speaker 8 (09:49):
And lawyers you know what I mean, And I want
ahead and told them, well, this is gonna be at
least fifteen fifteen hundred dollars, okay, the boot, not the count,
insurance and all this kind of stuff.
Speaker 7 (10:02):
And she says, you treat people taking advantage of people's
you know, tragedies, that's all you all are. Well, Uh,
doctors and lawyers do the same, do they not? I
need to think about that.
Speaker 6 (10:14):
I got chewed out. I can't act that were there.
Speaker 8 (10:17):
But we ended up with a contract for personal.
Speaker 1 (10:23):
So who was my uncle Chris?
Speaker 4 (10:26):
He's my baby brother.
Speaker 5 (10:27):
And we lived in Laurel Bay when Mama became pregnant
and I was fed up.
Speaker 4 (10:32):
With the boys.
Speaker 5 (10:33):
I had two brothers all I ever wanted in this
world was the sister. They promised me a sister, which
was in hindsight a big mistake. Anyhow, the baby finally
came and my father sheepishly told me, sorry, it's.
Speaker 4 (10:43):
Not a girl, it's another boy. So I left. I
ran away from home because a boy was born.
Speaker 5 (10:49):
The MPs found me and brought me back, which is
fine because it was getting dark, and they brought me
back and I was inconsolable. So my dad said, okay, Lapita,
you know what. I'm sorry, it's another boy, but you
can name him. So my initial reaction before I met
the baby was he was going to be called Poindexter.
Speaker 4 (11:08):
I was going to pay him back.
Speaker 5 (11:10):
And then he came and he was so pretty and
so sweet, and I loved him, so I gave him
the prettiest.
Speaker 4 (11:18):
Name I could come up with, Christopher. I thought it
was such a pretty name.
Speaker 5 (11:22):
So I got to name him Christopher. And because I
was the oldest girl, I was also the one that
got to babiesit him, so he was like my little baby.
Mama was overwhelmed having to do housework with, you know,
all the stuff that she never had to do. My
grandfather had always sent maids to us.
Speaker 4 (11:39):
We lived on base.
Speaker 5 (11:40):
We were the only military family that had a nanny
and a maid.
Speaker 4 (11:46):
Oh god, what I grew up with.
Speaker 5 (11:48):
But anyhow, so Mama was very busy and I love
taking care of Chris. But Mama realized that there was
something not right about Chris, and she kept taking him
to the military doctors and they were like.
Speaker 4 (11:58):
No, he's fine, he's fine.
Speaker 5 (11:59):
So she finally went to the general on base and said,
these doctors are not treating me properly, and my son,
there's something wrong. Long in the short, they found out
Christopher had a brain tumor, thanks to my mother, and
they caught it in time and didn't have a chance
to grow and ruin his life. But Christopher was never
able to do some of the things like play football
and stuff because when they operated on him on the
(12:21):
side of his head, that part of the skull was
not hard anymore, it was soft. Then years later, Christopher
was always slow at anything having to do with reading, writing,
any of that, and my parents misconstrued it to have
to do with the brain tumor and thought he was
somewhat retarded, slow touched, whatever the proper terms are, and
(12:42):
they babied him more.
Speaker 4 (12:44):
But what we know now is Christopher had dyslexia.
Speaker 1 (12:47):
He wouldn't get an official dyslexia diagnosis until middle school.
Up until then, he was pretty babied by my grandparents
because they didn't think he was capable of doing a
lot of things himself. So as a result, he was
determined to look and act tough.
Speaker 5 (13:01):
What was interesting about dear little Christopher is he had
a heart of gold, a tremendous imagination. He could draw
like you've never seen. He could do sculptures, But because
he was trying to be macho and be a man,
he didn't think that was a talent. That was something
he threw to the side. He wanted to be tough
and rough, that kind of guy.
Speaker 1 (13:21):
My mom was ten years older than Chris, so she
really only got to spend a lot of time with
him during his very young years. He was only seven
years old when she left the house to go to college.
Chris would live in Panama on the US military base
on the Canal Zone until he was eighteen years old.
Speaker 4 (13:37):
There was no place for him in school.
Speaker 5 (13:39):
He had dyslexia, so Mom threw a fuss and again
went to the generals and said, how's it possible you
have a school system here for everybody and you don't
have something for somebody that has special.
Speaker 1 (13:49):
Needs, pulling her infamous Doluho, who I am, Roquel Magic.
My grandma was responsible for getting the first special education
program started in the Canal Zone school system, needed for
kids with learning disabilities. It was known as the LD Department.
Speaker 5 (14:04):
But what happened was they started a special ad where
they brought mentally retarded children in that were worse off
than him. By then, he's in middle school and he'd
asked a girl out and the gals that.
Speaker 4 (14:15):
I'm not going with anybody from the LD Department, and
so he shrunk.
Speaker 5 (14:20):
I read a psychological report that they had done on him.
Speaker 4 (14:23):
The report said that he was a gentle soul with a.
Speaker 5 (14:26):
Great heart, which I knew, but because of how he
saw himself, he thought it was important to be rougher
and tougher than anyone, and he was always going to
surround himself by this is my version trashy people.
Speaker 4 (14:41):
He'd been feeling inferior for so long.
Speaker 5 (14:42):
Between Mama's prestigious connections and Panama and school and everything else.
Speaker 4 (14:46):
He just felt very inferior.
Speaker 5 (14:48):
So the way he was going to fix that is
he was going to surround himself by lesser than anybody.
Speaker 7 (14:52):
You know.
Speaker 1 (14:53):
So in school he's at the bottom of the class. Yeah,
and when they put him in the special ed, he's
now at the top of that.
Speaker 4 (14:59):
But it did not make him feel better.
Speaker 1 (15:01):
It seems like that's kind of a strategy he's stuck with,
or exactly what's the world he learned how to operate?
Speaker 4 (15:06):
That's it. Thank you.
Speaker 1 (15:09):
The people that were staying with them. The way Chris
described it is they were the help. They were his housekeepers. Yeah,
he's kind of putting himself in a situation where he's
the top of the heat.
Speaker 4 (15:19):
They owe him because he's letting him stay with you. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (15:24):
My mom would spend her summers during college and sometime
after graduating down in Panama. It was during this time
that she got to know Chris a little better.
Speaker 5 (15:32):
I would go home from college in the summers and
adored Chris, and he and I would laugh and we'd
watch TV shows together, and he liked movies like me.
And at that time he was still a kid. When
I went and worked that year in the Canal Zone,
he was starting to do and say inappropriate stuff, and
I used to have to remind him, Hey, I'm not
just some girl on the streets.
Speaker 4 (15:53):
I'm your sister.
Speaker 5 (15:54):
I don't want to hear that language. I don't want
to hear those words. And then he would oh, sorry, Lapina,
Sorry sorry.
Speaker 1 (16:00):
Years later, when my mom was living in Virginia and
dating my dad, her parents sent Chris up to the
States to live with her.
Speaker 5 (16:06):
They sent Christopher up to the States because he got
in trouble.
Speaker 4 (16:09):
I can't remember what he did.
Speaker 5 (16:11):
He wanted to be a bricklayer, so we were putting
him in bricklayer school, but he was a slot. He
was tearing up my house and I was livid with him.
But in the end he got a job and he
went on his own.
Speaker 1 (16:23):
You know, did you kick him out or you just
found a place for him.
Speaker 4 (16:26):
I don't remember kicking him out.
Speaker 5 (16:27):
I remember screaming at him a lot, fighting with him
a lot, arguing with him.
Speaker 4 (16:31):
But then we were fine. Then we'd watch a movie together.
Speaker 1 (16:35):
My mom was always there to take care of my
uncle Chris. You can get a sense of the big
sister little brother dynamic from this Christmas clip. Here. He
is Christmas nineteen eighty eight opening up a Christmas gift
a wristwatch in and Nellie even me, Oh.
Speaker 6 (16:51):
Boy, that's that.
Speaker 4 (16:53):
You won't have to ask me every two minutes what
time it is. You think it'll work?
Speaker 6 (16:57):
Yeah? Well, the thing is, how do you work?
Speaker 1 (17:00):
We good?
Speaker 6 (17:01):
I only get a watch.
Speaker 1 (17:02):
He didn't have a watch to watch. I just remember
changed batteries on him.
Speaker 6 (17:06):
What else did I get? I'm greedy, yell want light prices? Yeah?
Speaker 4 (17:13):
Yeah, Oh gosh, you better drive do that?
Speaker 1 (17:16):
Pretty good looking guy, kind of square job that he
had your mom's eyes.
Speaker 5 (17:21):
The emerald green eyes, the double eyelashes, the jet black hair,
everything I wanted?
Speaker 1 (17:27):
And what was it? So he wanted to be a
marine or he wanted.
Speaker 4 (17:29):
To Oh that was the heartbreak.
Speaker 1 (17:31):
I remember. He was always working out, very fit.
Speaker 5 (17:35):
Yeah, he wanted to be a marine more than anything.
And so he went and applied and the Marines wouldn't
take him. Part of the reason, truthfully, was the brain.
Speaker 4 (17:43):
Tumor and that soft spot in his head.
Speaker 5 (17:45):
But the other thing is the kid couldn't read it
really right that well, and he came across as slow,
and so the Marines just didn't want him.
Speaker 4 (17:53):
And that crushed him. That absolutely crushed him.
Speaker 1 (18:07):
Over the years, Chris would work various odd jobs.
Speaker 5 (18:10):
At one point the brick laying got to be too hard.
It messed up his back and stuff. Then he went
to truck driving school. There was some problem with that.
He was driving big rigs for a while and then
something happened there. And then he went to South Carolina
where he started working for this family owned garbage company
and they really liked him.
Speaker 1 (18:30):
Also. Over the years, his drinking problem got worse. Eventually
it would cost him his job at the garbage company
in South Carolina.
Speaker 5 (18:37):
And the alcohol was a serious, serious thing. In the end,
it caused him to lose his job. At that point,
he was a truck driver and he was driving a
garbage truck and making really good money.
Speaker 4 (18:48):
But he drank too much and they had to let
him go and they paid for him to go to
rehab twice. They liked him that much. They also everybody loved.
Speaker 5 (18:57):
Chris, so twice they paid for rehab the third time
and they were like sorry.
Speaker 1 (19:01):
In his late fifties, Uncle Chris was in trouble. He
was out of work with a severe drinking problem and
evicted from his trailer. My mom found places for him
to live and was paying his rent, but because of
the drinking and other issues, he was kicked out of
both places before the end of each month. As a
last resort, Chris managed to scrape together some cash and
(19:21):
bought a plane ticket to Panama to move in with
my grandparents. And you were saying that Chris hated Panama.
Speaker 5 (19:31):
He hated Panama with a passion, so Christopher again, because
he looked like Mama, looked more Latin. He was disenfranchised
by so many people. He wasn't feeling like he belonged
to the Americans, he didn't belong to the Panamanians. And
he just hated Panama because Mom wanted him to be
at the Union Club and wanted him to make friends there,
and those people wanted nothing to do with him. And
then the Canal Zone, they all thought, oh, you're ld,
we don't want you. So he never felt connected. He
(19:54):
hated Panama. He always said he hated it, and it
was only sheer desperation that he went back there lost everything.
Speaker 1 (20:03):
Do you know about that story? Did I tell you
about it at some point or I.
Speaker 6 (20:06):
Think you told me about it? And from what I recall,
you were staying in his house. But then some friends
were staying in his house, and one of his friends
was called Kittycat or something. Yep, and you could hardly
swip That's what I remember.
Speaker 1 (20:21):
This is my cousin Antonio. He lives in Panama, currently
in his mid twenties. He is the oldest of my
three cousins that were born and raised in Panama. He
speaks Spanish, English, and Chinese. He's a pretty impressive guy.
What's your first memory of Uncle Chris? Because I know
he was in the States for a long time, so
when was the first time you actually met him.
Speaker 6 (20:42):
I guess my first memory would be I think he
was in Panama and he had like a scar on
his shoulder or something, and I asked him, Hey, Uncle Chris,
what's that about. I was like, oh, I got shot here.
I was like, really no, I just hid myself with something.
But that's what I tell the girls. That's my first memory.
Speaker 2 (21:02):
I think.
Speaker 6 (21:02):
I remember I liked him. I thought it was cool.
Speaker 1 (21:05):
Antonio would end up spending a lot of time with
Uncle Chris when he returned to Panama.
Speaker 6 (21:09):
The reason he came back it is because he was
an alcoholic and I think in the States he was
getting detox, but then he fell into drinking and he
couldn't work because his hips were screwed up, so he
couldn't like walk or run, so he was really bored,
and he didn't know anybody here, so he didn't like
(21:31):
it being here.
Speaker 1 (21:35):
Chris was receiving a small amount of money through disability,
but most of it was spent on booze and cigarettes.
At this point, the situation with my grandparents was already chaotic.
My grandmother, Raquel, was roughly fifteen years into Alzheimer's and
had no clue who she was or what was happening.
She had trouble eating, sleeping, and using the bathroom. My
(21:56):
grandfather was just starting to show signs of dementia and
was practically deaf, mostly blind, and suffering from COPD, which
made it hard for him to breathe. Panama doesn't have
the best infrastructure for elder care, and both my grandparents
needed in house caretakers. On top of that, the house
and the yard were falling apart, literally being reclaimed by
(22:17):
the jungle, so my mom had to take care of
everything from Minnesota. It was a full time job for years.
She would spend hours on the phone every day dealing
with caretakers, doctors, nurses, landscapers, contractors. It was already a
nightmare for her, and the addition of Chris to the
mix would make things even more complicated. My mom started
(22:38):
getting calls from the neighbors. Chris was loud and was
leaving cigarette butts all over the place. His drinking was
out of control. He would pass out on the sidewalk
or in my grandparents' front yard. There was one time
where my grandpa had to actually drag him inside. It
was a lot for everyone.
Speaker 6 (22:57):
Grandpa didn't like Chris. I mean, you liked to he
just didn't like him here.
Speaker 5 (23:02):
Dad was frustrated because he didn't want him down there
because he was drinking, and Dad didn't want that.
Speaker 6 (23:07):
He was always showing him out. You know, Grandpa was
a little rough.
Speaker 1 (23:11):
I've only known him as like super nice grandpa, but
my understanding is he's spent more of his life not
being super nice Grandpa.
Speaker 6 (23:17):
It was really good with your mom, really mad with
the other ones, and Chris actually really liked Grandpa. He
told me I'm glad he was my dad. I wouldn't
want to be raised by some permissive dad. That's worse like,
I really liked him as a dad.
Speaker 5 (23:31):
He was always worried about my dad, and my dad
was mean to him, and that's what broke my heart.
And Christopher was always worried, you know, He's like, I
can do the Heimlich maneuver, dad's choked twice or Lapita.
The oxygen machine isn't working right. I was like, stay
away from the oxygen. You don't know what you're doing.
Don't get involved with it. And then the caretaker would
call and say, your brother fooled around with the ball
(23:52):
on the oxygen thing and it's not working.
Speaker 4 (23:54):
So it was it was always.
Speaker 5 (23:55):
I was always yelling at him, and I feel bad
about that.
Speaker 1 (23:59):
After my uncle arrived, my mom made a point to
go down there as soon as possible. She was worried
about her parents and worried about her brother. She realized
that he was in a really dark place.
Speaker 4 (24:09):
He was suicidal. He wanted to kill himself.
Speaker 5 (24:11):
I went down there and my dad had his closet
that he locked up, and he had two shotguns, a rifle,
a couple of pistols, a ton of ammunition, a machete,
you know, all things that you need to defend yourself.
Speaker 1 (24:26):
Remember at this point, my grandpa was over ninety years
old and practically blind, so an arsenal in the closet
was something that my mom had been worried about for
a while.
Speaker 5 (24:34):
I said, Daddy, show me what you would do if
someone comes in the house and you're going to get
a gun and he unlocks the door, he can barely
see it, opens it and he leans in to get
the rifle, and I just push him gently onto the
bed and he falls in, and I was like, Dad,
you're dead, You're done. So of course he did not
appreciate my assistance in showing him how inepty was. He
(24:55):
said a few curse words at me, threw the rifle
at me, and restored out of the room.
Speaker 6 (25:02):
Mew.
Speaker 5 (25:03):
The first thing I did, I threw all the weapons away.
My dad had a friend, and I said, throw him
in the ocean. I don't care what I'm out of here.
And one of them was apparently my Abuelito's prize pistol
that he brought the colonel back with.
Speaker 1 (25:15):
Yeah, that's right. A part of Panamanian history now rests
at the bottom of the ocean.
Speaker 5 (25:20):
So they were all mad at me, and I was like,
the kids suicidal he's sleeping in the room with the weapons.
Speaker 4 (25:25):
Come on, guys, give me a break.
Speaker 1 (25:27):
So he was suicidal and that's why he went. But
then that did he stop that.
Speaker 4 (25:31):
Talk or you know what, he was depressed.
Speaker 5 (25:34):
You have to take someone seriously if they say they
want to kill themselves, you can't. Just what I learned
when I work in the school system. She's supposed to
ask if you have a plan, and he didn't seem
to have one.
Speaker 4 (25:45):
But Christopher never had a plan, so it's.
Speaker 6 (25:47):
Like, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 (25:52):
The relationship my mom had with Chris was very different
from the one Antonio had with him. My mom had
been taking care of Chris for so much of his
life that by the time he showed up in Panama,
there was so much history and so much baggage that
she didn't have any patients left for. Antonio, on the
other hand, just got to spend time with Uncle Chris,
hanging out, running errands, shooting the shit.
Speaker 6 (26:13):
So I would see him like almost every weekend. I
was his errand boy. Basically I took him to the
groceries he used to call me. We would talk about
all movies and politics, but probably not popular opinions.
Speaker 1 (26:29):
Yeah, he's the first person who told me about lizard people.
Speaker 6 (26:32):
Oh I didn't mention that, but I can see him
believing that. You know, I never laugh at people that
believe in those stuff, because maybe it turns out to
be true. I don't know if it's a saying in English,
but broken clock works twice a day something like that.
Speaker 1 (26:48):
Yeah, what's the saying in Spanish? It's the same thing,
sounds better in Spanish. So Uncle Chris, because he had
such a thick southern accent, did that Gordon do a
Spanish at all?
Speaker 6 (27:02):
No, Like every gringo sounds the same when they speak Spanish. Really,
it sounds the same.
Speaker 1 (27:07):
Don'dstal of biblioteca?
Speaker 6 (27:09):
Yeah? Yeah, I just like that.
Speaker 1 (27:11):
Yeah, Antonio heard all sorts of fun and crazy stories
from Uncle Chris.
Speaker 6 (27:16):
Oh yeah, a bunch of funny stories. I remember he
was telling me about how he was a bounty hunter
for a time.
Speaker 1 (27:23):
Do you think he actually was a bounty hunter? Do
you think he's making it up?
Speaker 6 (27:26):
I can see him as a bounty hunter. Yeah, I
could see it too.
Speaker 1 (27:31):
Apparently Chris's time as a bounty hunter was short lived.
He was happy to taze people, but some of the
guys he was working with preferred to use guns and
liked shooting the guns, so Chris was worried that they
might get him arrested if he stuck around. This was
a perfect segue for me to tell Antonio that I'd
heard Chris had actually killed some people. I told him
the story that Glenn told me in the car. Two
(27:52):
with a gun, two with his bare hands, one with
a knife. Curious what your thoughts are if that's true
or not. Did he ever mention any of those?
Speaker 6 (28:01):
I don't think so. I mean so the question is
if he killed people, would he be able to get
away with it? And five of them? That's tough.
Speaker 1 (28:14):
For the record, my mom also thinks the story is bullshit.
Speaker 4 (28:17):
It makes no sense.
Speaker 5 (28:18):
There is such a sweetness to Chris, and he could
turn anybody. He always talked a good story, and you
knew they weren't true.
Speaker 1 (28:25):
Chris would end up spending the last three years of
his life living with my grandparents in Panama. Somehow he
was able to get the drinking down to a more
manageable level, and overall things seemed to mellow out quite
a bit. At some point, Chris developed a bit of
a romantic relationship with my grandparents, next door neighbor, a
woman originally from Russia about uncle Chris's age. My mom
(28:47):
had gotten to know this neighbor over the years because
she lived next door and would help out with my grandparents.
But one day the complaints stopped.
Speaker 5 (28:54):
So when Christopher moved down there, she would not stop
sending me what zapps and complaining and calling because he
was littering, he was smelling.
Speaker 4 (29:01):
Up her area, he was leaving trash. The outside was
a mess. Da da da da da da.
Speaker 5 (29:06):
And I was calling Chris and yelling at him, and
I said, you can't be doing this.
Speaker 4 (29:10):
And it was a constant stress for me to keep
that gal happy.
Speaker 6 (29:14):
From what I know, at first she did not like him,
but then he seduced her and I guess, no, lo
Chris fashion.
Speaker 4 (29:24):
And everything's good.
Speaker 5 (29:25):
The maid's quick complaining to me about the caretakers quit complaining.
Speaker 1 (29:30):
Chris managed to get on a better form of disability
and was now receiving a little more money and started
ordering lots of dinners to the house. The nurses and
caretakers would report to my mom about the budding romance
that Chris was having with the Russian neighbor, and it.
Speaker 5 (29:43):
Would be over at her house in the backyard candlelight dinners.
So they were like all cracking up about this big romance.
Speaker 6 (29:53):
I think if you lift a bit more, it would
have left to something.
Speaker 1 (30:14):
It really did seem like he was starting a real relationship.
He seemed to be in a much better place than
he was when he got there. My grandparents' health was
in a constant state of decline, but for Uncle Chris,
things were looking okay until one of my uncles died unexpectedly.
My uncle Antonio's dad died suddenly of a heart attack
in December. A couple of days after that, Chris would
(30:36):
have his first heart attack. A few weeks later, in February,
my grandmother, Roquell died. Chris had another heart attack the
day after that and went to the hospital.
Speaker 5 (30:48):
On the thirteenth of February, Mama died, and I was
so relieved for her, because there was nothing left of her.
She may have weighed fifty pounds. She couldn't speak, she
couldn't swallow, she couldn't anything. She it was just nothing
but bones and no teeth, and oh, it just it
was heartbreaking.
Speaker 4 (31:06):
To watch her.
Speaker 5 (31:06):
And I don't know how she kept on live as
long as she did, and she died. And then on
the fifteenth, Christopher died, and it was like so much
all at once. And then my poor dad, with his dementia,
he couldn't comprehend. You know, we're all trying to not
(31:29):
tell Dad too much. We don't want to get him upset.
Speaker 1 (31:31):
No one had told my grandpa that Chris had had
another heart attack or that he was in the hospital.
That day, one of the nurses got the call that
Chris had died. She went to go check on my grandpa,
who was supposed to be taking his afternoon nap.
Speaker 5 (31:44):
She goes back in the room and she said, my dad,
who had been sound asleep, is sitting on the side
of the bed with his feet on the floor, looks
right at her, and he said, Roquel came and got
Christopher and they're not coming back. And then he laid
down and went back to sleep. It's so weird, but
so Latin.
Speaker 4 (32:03):
I mean, the Lat's all the America.
Speaker 1 (32:05):
I remember your your mom would have dreams.
Speaker 5 (32:09):
Yeah, so it's it's just like that's that's the spiritual
part of the Latin culture, you know, where they have that.
Speaker 4 (32:14):
So for Dad to do that was nuts.
Speaker 5 (32:16):
So when Daddy gets upset and it's crying about it,
I said, Daddy.
Speaker 4 (32:20):
Remember, Mom didn't even want.
Speaker 5 (32:22):
To go well because she didn't know what to do
about Christopher, how to take care of him when she died,
So she saw that she came to got.
Speaker 6 (32:31):
So.
Speaker 5 (32:31):
Anyhow, Mama's favorite son died, then she died, and then
she came back and got the one she worried the
most about.
Speaker 1 (32:39):
The details of Chris's death are a little complicated. First
and foremost, despite his fitness regimen, he was a chainsmoker
who bit the filters off of cigarettes and drank a lot,
which you know isn't good for the heart. A couple
of days after my other uncle died, Chris had his
first heart attack and went to the public hospital.
Speaker 5 (32:58):
He stayed there for two days, but when they wouldn't
let him have his cigarettes, he blew up and left.
He signed himself out and left.
Speaker 6 (33:06):
He started to have withdrawal symptoms from smoking. He can
smoke in the hospital, so he wanted to get out.
Speaker 1 (33:12):
Chris ended up signing some waivers that said he refused
care from the hospital and checked himself out. Afterwards, he
decided that the doctors didn't know what they were talking
about and that it wasn't a heart attack, it was
just heartburn. Less than a month later, when my Grandma
Raquel died, Chris was very upset.
Speaker 6 (33:29):
So he ordered a whole pizza and ate it at night,
and then that like gave his heart trouble and then
he had to go to the hospital.
Speaker 1 (33:39):
He was having another heart attack, and because he had
refused service at the previous public hospital, they wouldn't admit him.
His only option was to go to a private hospital.
They were able to stabilize him, but said they needed
to operate because he had a blockage in his heart,
but they wouldn't do anything until they received ten thousand
dollars up front.
Speaker 6 (33:57):
Because for COVID they had a policy where you have
to past ten thousand dollars before they could treat him.
Speaker 1 (34:04):
Ten thousand.
Speaker 6 (34:05):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (34:06):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (34:07):
It was chaotic, but my other uncle up in the
States was able to get the money down to Panama
the next day and Chris was able to get the operation.
Antonio was with him at the hospital and said that
Chris was really worried that the money wouldn't come through,
but once it finally did, he was relieved and ready
to get the operation. He seemed pretty calm about everything.
Speaker 6 (34:26):
It was fine up until then. He has a procedure
and then he dies and somehow they spent five ten
thousand dollars.
Speaker 1 (34:34):
Were you the last person who saw him?
Speaker 6 (34:36):
Yeah, I don't like that hospital. It feels like if
he had gone to another hospital, he might be a lot.
Speaker 5 (34:44):
I don't know what do you agree to or what happened.
Speaker 4 (34:46):
All I know is that he died on the operating table.
Speaker 5 (34:52):
And then we had him cremated. Mama was cremated, and
a month later we did a funeral service for him
and Mama together and they're buried in the same crypt
where my grandparents are buried.
Speaker 1 (35:05):
So Uncle Chris is now.
Speaker 4 (35:07):
In the country. He didn't want to ever go back
to who he's buried in.
Speaker 1 (35:14):
My mom remembered something Chris said to her at their
brother's funeral only weeks before he died, worried about either
of my grandparents passing away.
Speaker 4 (35:21):
Next, I can't handle two funerals close together. It'll kill me.
And I thought, wow, you did. You got two together
and you killed you.
Speaker 1 (35:31):
My uncle Chris is buried at the Santuario Nacional de
Corrazon de Maria It's a beautiful old Spanish style church
in the heart of Panama City. After my uncle, my grandma,
and Chris died, my Grandpa's dementia became much worse. He
would wake up every morning trying to find Raquel, forgetting
that she had passed away, and every day my mom
(35:53):
had to call him on the phone and tell him
that she was gone. He died a year and a
half later, and I was able to go down to
the funeral and watch as they put his cremated remains
in the same crypt, along with my grandmother and my
uncle Chris. Their names now among many of the names
of the Valdez family, all in a special VIP section
of the crypt designated for the founding families of Panama.
(36:19):
Is there anything you wish you could have done different?
Speaker 5 (36:21):
Or I wish I'd had a lot more patience with
Chris those last three years he was in Panama. I
was always angry at him because I felt like he
was making it hard for my parents, he was making
it hard for me, he was making it hard for
the neighbor. You know. It's just like I was trying
to please all these different people when truthfully, screw it.
(36:43):
You know, I don't have a lot of regrets. I
don't at all, but that is a little one to have.
Wouldn't have killed me to have more time to listen
to him. I was like, all right, Chris gotta go,
and he was lonely. He would call because he was lonely,
But then he talks so much stupidity, so I could
never really have a conversation with him. So maybe I'm
just being too sentimental thinking that things could have been different,
(37:06):
because we're both grown people and very different.
Speaker 1 (37:10):
This whole project's kind of sentimental because he was who
he was, and the only version of him I know
is the version of him I have in my head. Yeah,
but that sweetness about him, and it seems like a
lot of other.
Speaker 5 (37:22):
People I think, so as we've talked about him, I
think you're right, because I why would a garbage company pay.
Speaker 4 (37:29):
Twice for him to go to rehab?
Speaker 1 (37:30):
Right?
Speaker 4 (37:31):
Why would they care?
Speaker 5 (37:32):
I just feel like they could see that under all
that bluster, it was a kind, gentle soul. But life
had taught him to be rough and tough and crude
and tough sounding, you know, which was sad because he
was such a sweet little boy.
Speaker 1 (37:51):
My uncle Chris had a huge impact on my life,
even though I only ever saw him a handful of times.
He lived a hard, lonely life, and I think he
deserved much better. It seemed like an uphill battle from
day one, and just when things finally started to make
a turn for the better, he met his tragic end.
The night I stayed on my uncle Chris's trailer. There
(38:12):
was a naive kid who thought I was ready to
go out and find my place in the world, whatever
that meant. In the nearly twenty years since then, I've
learned that the world means different things to different people,
and who you are in it isn't entirely up to you.
For each of us, our lives are a personal journey, hopes,
dreams and goals that we want to accomplish, problems that
(38:34):
we want to solve, feelings that we want to avoid.
But eventually you won't be here anymore, and whatever your
inner thoughts and personal experiences were, they'll be gone forever,
and all that will be left of you are the
stories that someone remembers you telling, or the stories that
someone else tells about you. Those stories will be told
(38:58):
from the perspective of someone Hitch viking with you through Nebraska,
a guy filming a documentary about you and your friends
on the Mississippi, a kid running past you to avoid
sniper fire, or a nephew who spent one night in
your trailer. Depending on the story, you'll be an asshole,
(39:20):
a hero, an adventurer, a victim, maybe even a pirate.
None of us know what the story of our life
will be when we're gone, so try your best to
make it a good one. Thank you so much for
(39:50):
listening to this podcast. I want to give special thanks
to everyone who shared their stories, Marcus, Matt, Bill and Turner, Antonio, Aggi, Demetrius,
and of course my mom and I want to give
a special shout out to Glenn and Kitty Kat wherever
they are, and really big thanks to my uncle Chris
wherever he is. I'd like to give some special thanks
(40:27):
to Brent Kaiser and Unbridled Sound for their very generous
assistance and advice throughout this whole process, the patients and
support of my wife and kids for all the time
I spent in the basement putting this thing together, and
especially to you the listener, if you've made it this
far all the way to the end, thank you so
much for listening. Uncle Chris is a production by Will
Ferrell's Big Money Players Network and iHeart Podcasts. It's created
(40:50):
and hosted by me Ian faff I, wrote, directed, scored,
edited and mixed this episode. The show is executive produced
by Hans Sanhi and Will Ferrell, co produced by Olivia Aguilar.
If you want to see what else I'm up to,
go to eanfaf dot com or check out my Instagram.
Spring Break nineteen eighty four
Hey there, welcome back. Here's my friend Bill again.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
Did Turner talk to you about loll our buddy?
Speaker 1 (00:19):
That's past way. No, I just loved him. He was
an old scoundrel.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
So we had a memorial for him a couple of
weeks ago, and some of his families there a lot
of them, aren't You could tell that as beloved as
Lowell was by his chosen family, family life was very
different with Lowell. It was like, I know you're a scoundrel,
and your.
Speaker 1 (00:41):
Memorial proved that.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
You know, like I can tell that your family life
was complicated and I don't know the ins and outs
of it. But I loved him because with so many
people like that, they're larger than life. They kind of
feel like movie characters. They're why out and it's only
until you have to be close to them that it
(01:04):
I guess if you have to be family, you know,
because I grew to be quite close with a little
but like when you're responsible for them, for family that
can be tougher, you probably don't look at them quite
like quite like a fun pirate to have around.
Speaker 1 (01:21):
This is the final episode of the podcast, and here
to help me set it up are Bill and Turner,
the two brothers that are filmmakers currently based in New Orleans.
Here's Bill again.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
My uncle's a wild guy, but like not with like
drugs and guns and stuff. But whenever he would come
over for like holidays, my mom be like, oh God,
and me and turn be like yes, because he was like,
he was an incredible storyteller and he like he would
take us out to bars to watch like WrestleMania, and
(01:53):
it was fucking fun.
Speaker 1 (01:55):
You know. My uncle likes to say.
Speaker 2 (01:57):
Like you should always be around notable all stars and luminaries.
You should be able to judge who is who and
what is what. Growing up, I feel like I was
always around like characters, some of them good, some of
them bad. But you know, there was always sort of
this like spectrum of folks and here's Turner.
Speaker 3 (02:19):
When we were growing up, there were pariahs in town
who I always thought were so fascinating, And we had
a shame billboard for people who got arrested for certain things.
They just put your name up on a billboard. One
of my buddies growing up, we were real good friends
and had a good time, had good sweet, innocent time
and also got into a lot of trouble and things
(02:40):
worked out in my favor and things didn't work out
in his. And he's spent a life in prison, and
for years we'd keep a correspondence and he was, you know,
he's he's a fucking outlaw.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
He's not.
Speaker 3 (02:56):
He's a lot of things, but he probably belongs where
he is. But he's also a sweet human being that
I know just wanted to try and just wanted to
be loved, but just didn't have a good shake of it,
and so adapted to the world that he had to.
And I think whether you come from a shit place
or you end up in one, you have to adapt.
(03:16):
And sometimes that takes its toll. And people get discarded
because of their perceived flaws, and it doesn't mean they're
inherently bad.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
They're people.
Speaker 3 (03:25):
They have a story and there's probably a reason for it,
and it's more interesting for me to try to understand
that than to just discard it.
Speaker 1 (03:36):
This final episode is going to focus on my uncle
Chris's life. So far, I've portrayed him as a bit
of a cartoon character, a gun toting redneck with a
big old mullet, but that's not entirely my fault. One
might argue that that's exactly what he was going for.
All of us tend to choose how we present ourselves
to the world through our clothing choices, facial hairstyles, whether
(03:59):
or not the brim of a hat is curved or straight,
the types of frames you have for your glasses, the
cars we drive, the music we like, even the podcasts
we listen to. These are all choices that we make
for ourselves, but like it or not, they also broadcast
to the people around us who we are, or at
least who we're trying to be. For my uncle Chris,
(04:21):
I think he knew exactly what he was putting out there.
Without touching politics, I think it's pretty safe to point
out that we've been living in a time where it's
becoming easier and more acceptable to write off an entire
person based on superficial characteristics. Almost everything is coded at
this point. Choice of words, clothing, even haircuts can immediately
(04:42):
put any of us on either side of the cultural binary,
one side or the other, embraced or disgraced, good or bad,
And a lot of times you know good or bad
is different depending on which side you fall on. I
can't think of anyone it would be easier to apply
this type of superficial judgment to more than my uncle Chris.
He looked like a stereotype. If I say, redneck or
(05:06):
conspiracy theorist or gun nut, the character that pops into
most people's minds probably looks just like him. And for
a lot of people, that would be a green light
to just write him off entirely, disregard him as a person,
maybe even consider him to be a problem. But he
was a person, and he lived a very hard life,
(05:27):
and he had his reasons for being the way he was.
And I'm very grateful that I got to grow up
knowing someone like my uncle Chris, because knowing him helped
me understand how important it is to not write people off,
to try to understand and appreciate who they are and
what they've been through, because a lot of times that
might give you an idea of what it is they're
(05:49):
actually trying to do. But that being said, they don't
always make it easy. Here's me and my mom. I
remember he would come to our house Virginia. He would
smoke a pipe outside on the deck.
Speaker 4 (06:03):
That's right, he was not allowed to smoke in my house.
Speaker 1 (06:05):
I remember he would watch Clint Eastwood movies inside the house,
and I remember at some point him showing me how
to clean a pistol, so I must have been five
years old, and I remember being in the garage and
Uncle Chris showing me it must have been like a Bretta,
some type of handgun, and him taking it apart to
clean it, and I remember him having the brush and
all the stuff and he's in the oil, and then
(06:26):
him putting it all together and letting me hold it.
And then at some point you coming out and seeing
me holding a gun and yelling at Chris.
Speaker 4 (06:34):
I have no memory of that, but it wouldn't surprise me. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (06:37):
The other one is there was some Christmas. I just
remember him saying how old are you? And I said ten,
and he said, well, I didn't get you at present
this year, but tell you what, when you're sixteen, I'll
take you to a strip club.
Speaker 4 (06:49):
That sounds about right.
Speaker 1 (06:50):
And I remember turning sixteen and wishing I had his number, but.
Speaker 5 (06:58):
Sad but probably true.
Speaker 1 (07:00):
Man, I wish i'd go Chris hung out work. The
last one is when we spent a day with him
in Charleston, and I remember seeing his trailer for the
first time, then with the Confederate flags for window curtains.
But I remember we're in line at subway and I
saw he had a leather fanny pack and I said, oh,
(07:20):
what's what you got in the fanny pack? And he
said protection. He just done zips it and pulls out
a revolver, just in line at subway.
Speaker 5 (07:28):
Now you explained to me how I came from these
people's That's what just floors me.
Speaker 1 (07:33):
There's like a sweetness to him, a niceness where even
though he was scary and mean and rugged and drunk
like all this stuff, there was just still something about. Yeah,
there's a kindness.
Speaker 5 (07:46):
He kind of built this persona that he was trying
to fill in.
Speaker 4 (07:50):
Yeah, but he always had that.
Speaker 1 (07:51):
Sweetheart and he couldn't hide it. And I think that's
the that's why I always liked him.
Speaker 4 (07:56):
Everybody, Yeah, everyone liked it.
Speaker 5 (07:58):
He exasperated the hell out of but I loved him.
There was one year where he showed up with all
these stuffed animals and he had them all talking to you.
I knew he didn't have any money, so I thought
he stole.
Speaker 4 (08:11):
To be honest, but he had the.
Speaker 5 (08:13):
Stuffed animals and he was playing with you.
Speaker 4 (08:15):
And you were just a little guy, and you loved it.
Speaker 1 (08:19):
After I turned ten years old, I only ever saw
Uncle Chris three more times, and I only spoke to
him on the phone once or twice. So much of
my fondness for him comes from when I was really
young growing up in Virginia. He lived nearby and was
always around for holidays and joined us on Christmas. This
is a clip from an old VHS tape I found
Christmas morning nineteen eighty eight. I was four years old,
(08:40):
and he gave me a stuffed Tasmanian devil.
Speaker 6 (08:44):
What is it? Ian Tasmanian Devil?
Speaker 5 (08:48):
I got bucked Bunny and Sevesta.
Speaker 6 (08:51):
Oh here he.
Speaker 1 (08:55):
Is opening a gift for my grandparents.
Speaker 7 (08:57):
All right, ry combat boots, Yeah, buddy, this is what
I've been wanting for a while.
Speaker 6 (09:02):
I got me a pair already.
Speaker 1 (09:03):
But this is another style. I wish I had more
footage with good audio and a lot of these home movies,
he's sitting there quietly in the background, occasionally chiming in,
but it's hard to understand. I was able to find
this clip though, from a family reunion in two thousand
and two, where he's telling a story about when he
worked as a landscaper.
Speaker 7 (09:25):
You know. Ken sent me out to do an estimate, right,
and so I figured out how much it would cost.
Speaker 1 (09:30):
You can do this, do that that, do this?
Speaker 6 (09:32):
And this is a tree about.
Speaker 7 (09:34):
To eventually fall over a house.
Speaker 8 (09:36):
Count the costs it would be for crane, how many
helpers I needed at least three groundsman, two climbers.
Speaker 1 (09:43):
And all this and all that. And I want ahead
and did my figuring, wrote up the price in their doctors.
Speaker 8 (09:49):
And lawyers you know what I mean, And I want
ahead and told them, well, this is gonna be at
least fifteen fifteen hundred dollars, okay, the boot, not the count,
insurance and all this kind of stuff.
Speaker 7 (10:02):
And she says, you treat people taking advantage of people's
you know, tragedies, that's all you all are. Well, Uh,
doctors and lawyers do the same, do they not? I
need to think about that.
Speaker 6 (10:14):
I got chewed out. I can't act that were there.
Speaker 8 (10:17):
But we ended up with a contract for personal.
Speaker 1 (10:23):
So who was my uncle Chris?
Speaker 4 (10:26):
He's my baby brother.
Speaker 5 (10:27):
And we lived in Laurel Bay when Mama became pregnant
and I was fed up.
Speaker 4 (10:32):
With the boys.
Speaker 5 (10:33):
I had two brothers all I ever wanted in this
world was the sister. They promised me a sister, which
was in hindsight a big mistake. Anyhow, the baby finally
came and my father sheepishly told me, sorry, it's.
Speaker 4 (10:43):
Not a girl, it's another boy. So I left. I
ran away from home because a boy was born.
Speaker 5 (10:49):
The MPs found me and brought me back, which is
fine because it was getting dark, and they brought me
back and I was inconsolable. So my dad said, okay, Lapita,
you know what. I'm sorry, it's another boy, but you
can name him. So my initial reaction before I met
the baby was he was going to be called Poindexter.
Speaker 4 (11:08):
I was going to pay him back.
Speaker 5 (11:10):
And then he came and he was so pretty and
so sweet, and I loved him, so I gave him
the prettiest.
Speaker 4 (11:18):
Name I could come up with, Christopher. I thought it
was such a pretty name.
Speaker 5 (11:22):
So I got to name him Christopher. And because I
was the oldest girl, I was also the one that
got to babiesit him, so he was like my little baby.
Mama was overwhelmed having to do housework with, you know,
all the stuff that she never had to do. My
grandfather had always sent maids to us.
Speaker 4 (11:39):
We lived on base.
Speaker 5 (11:40):
We were the only military family that had a nanny
and a maid.
Speaker 4 (11:46):
Oh god, what I grew up with.
Speaker 5 (11:48):
But anyhow, so Mama was very busy and I love
taking care of Chris. But Mama realized that there was
something not right about Chris, and she kept taking him
to the military doctors and they were like.
Speaker 4 (11:58):
No, he's fine, he's fine.
Speaker 5 (11:59):
So she finally went to the general on base and said,
these doctors are not treating me properly, and my son,
there's something wrong. Long in the short, they found out
Christopher had a brain tumor, thanks to my mother, and
they caught it in time and didn't have a chance
to grow and ruin his life. But Christopher was never
able to do some of the things like play football
and stuff because when they operated on him on the
(12:21):
side of his head, that part of the skull was
not hard anymore, it was soft. Then years later, Christopher
was always slow at anything having to do with reading, writing,
any of that, and my parents misconstrued it to have
to do with the brain tumor and thought he was
somewhat retarded, slow touched, whatever the proper terms are, and
(12:42):
they babied him more.
Speaker 4 (12:44):
But what we know now is Christopher had dyslexia.
Speaker 1 (12:47):
He wouldn't get an official dyslexia diagnosis until middle school.
Up until then, he was pretty babied by my grandparents
because they didn't think he was capable of doing a
lot of things himself. So as a result, he was
determined to look and act tough.
Speaker 5 (13:01):
What was interesting about dear little Christopher is he had
a heart of gold, a tremendous imagination. He could draw
like you've never seen. He could do sculptures, But because
he was trying to be macho and be a man,
he didn't think that was a talent. That was something
he threw to the side. He wanted to be tough
and rough, that kind of guy.
Speaker 1 (13:21):
My mom was ten years older than Chris, so she
really only got to spend a lot of time with
him during his very young years. He was only seven
years old when she left the house to go to college.
Chris would live in Panama on the US military base
on the Canal Zone until he was eighteen years old.
Speaker 4 (13:37):
There was no place for him in school.
Speaker 5 (13:39):
He had dyslexia, so Mom threw a fuss and again
went to the generals and said, how's it possible you
have a school system here for everybody and you don't
have something for somebody that has special.
Speaker 1 (13:49):
Needs, pulling her infamous Doluho, who I am, Roquel Magic.
My grandma was responsible for getting the first special education
program started in the Canal Zone school system, needed for
kids with learning disabilities. It was known as the LD Department.
Speaker 5 (14:04):
But what happened was they started a special ad where
they brought mentally retarded children in that were worse off
than him. By then, he's in middle school and he'd
asked a girl out and the gals that.
Speaker 4 (14:15):
I'm not going with anybody from the LD Department, and
so he shrunk.
Speaker 5 (14:20):
I read a psychological report that they had done on him.
Speaker 4 (14:23):
The report said that he was a gentle soul with a.
Speaker 5 (14:26):
Great heart, which I knew, but because of how he
saw himself, he thought it was important to be rougher
and tougher than anyone, and he was always going to
surround himself by this is my version trashy people.
Speaker 4 (14:41):
He'd been feeling inferior for so long.
Speaker 5 (14:42):
Between Mama's prestigious connections and Panama and school and everything else.
Speaker 4 (14:46):
He just felt very inferior.
Speaker 5 (14:48):
So the way he was going to fix that is
he was going to surround himself by lesser than anybody.
Speaker 7 (14:52):
You know.
Speaker 1 (14:53):
So in school he's at the bottom of the class. Yeah,
and when they put him in the special ed, he's
now at the top of that.
Speaker 4 (14:59):
But it did not make him feel better.
Speaker 1 (15:01):
It seems like that's kind of a strategy he's stuck with,
or exactly what's the world he learned how to operate?
Speaker 4 (15:06):
That's it. Thank you.
Speaker 1 (15:09):
The people that were staying with them. The way Chris
described it is they were the help. They were his housekeepers. Yeah,
he's kind of putting himself in a situation where he's
the top of the heat.
Speaker 4 (15:19):
They owe him because he's letting him stay with you. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (15:24):
My mom would spend her summers during college and sometime
after graduating down in Panama. It was during this time
that she got to know Chris a little better.
Speaker 5 (15:32):
I would go home from college in the summers and
adored Chris, and he and I would laugh and we'd
watch TV shows together, and he liked movies like me.
And at that time he was still a kid. When
I went and worked that year in the Canal Zone,
he was starting to do and say inappropriate stuff, and
I used to have to remind him, Hey, I'm not
just some girl on the streets.
Speaker 4 (15:53):
I'm your sister.
Speaker 5 (15:54):
I don't want to hear that language. I don't want
to hear those words. And then he would oh, sorry, Lapina,
Sorry sorry.
Speaker 1 (16:00):
Years later, when my mom was living in Virginia and
dating my dad, her parents sent Chris up to the
States to live with her.
Speaker 5 (16:06):
They sent Christopher up to the States because he got
in trouble.
Speaker 4 (16:09):
I can't remember what he did.
Speaker 5 (16:11):
He wanted to be a bricklayer, so we were putting
him in bricklayer school, but he was a slot. He
was tearing up my house and I was livid with him.
But in the end he got a job and he
went on his own.
Speaker 1 (16:23):
You know, did you kick him out or you just
found a place for him.
Speaker 4 (16:26):
I don't remember kicking him out.
Speaker 5 (16:27):
I remember screaming at him a lot, fighting with him
a lot, arguing with him.
Speaker 4 (16:31):
But then we were fine. Then we'd watch a movie together.
Speaker 1 (16:35):
My mom was always there to take care of my
uncle Chris. You can get a sense of the big
sister little brother dynamic from this Christmas clip. Here. He
is Christmas nineteen eighty eight opening up a Christmas gift
a wristwatch in and Nellie even me, Oh.
Speaker 6 (16:51):
Boy, that's that.
Speaker 4 (16:53):
You won't have to ask me every two minutes what
time it is. You think it'll work?
Speaker 6 (16:57):
Yeah? Well, the thing is, how do you work?
Speaker 1 (17:00):
We good?
Speaker 6 (17:01):
I only get a watch.
Speaker 1 (17:02):
He didn't have a watch to watch. I just remember
changed batteries on him.
Speaker 6 (17:06):
What else did I get? I'm greedy, yell want light prices? Yeah?
Speaker 4 (17:13):
Yeah, Oh gosh, you better drive do that?
Speaker 1 (17:16):
Pretty good looking guy, kind of square job that he
had your mom's eyes.
Speaker 5 (17:21):
The emerald green eyes, the double eyelashes, the jet black hair,
everything I wanted?
Speaker 1 (17:27):
And what was it? So he wanted to be a
marine or he wanted.
Speaker 4 (17:29):
To Oh that was the heartbreak.
Speaker 1 (17:31):
I remember. He was always working out, very fit.
Speaker 5 (17:35):
Yeah, he wanted to be a marine more than anything.
And so he went and applied and the Marines wouldn't
take him. Part of the reason, truthfully, was the brain.
Speaker 4 (17:43):
Tumor and that soft spot in his head.
Speaker 5 (17:45):
But the other thing is the kid couldn't read it
really right that well, and he came across as slow,
and so the Marines just didn't want him.
Speaker 4 (17:53):
And that crushed him. That absolutely crushed him.
Speaker 1 (18:07):
Over the years, Chris would work various odd jobs.
Speaker 5 (18:10):
At one point the brick laying got to be too hard.
It messed up his back and stuff. Then he went
to truck driving school. There was some problem with that.
He was driving big rigs for a while and then
something happened there. And then he went to South Carolina
where he started working for this family owned garbage company
and they really liked him.
Speaker 1 (18:30):
Also. Over the years, his drinking problem got worse. Eventually
it would cost him his job at the garbage company
in South Carolina.
Speaker 5 (18:37):
And the alcohol was a serious, serious thing. In the end,
it caused him to lose his job. At that point,
he was a truck driver and he was driving a
garbage truck and making really good money.
Speaker 4 (18:48):
But he drank too much and they had to let
him go and they paid for him to go to
rehab twice. They liked him that much. They also everybody loved.
Speaker 5 (18:57):
Chris, so twice they paid for rehab the third time
and they were like sorry.
Speaker 1 (19:01):
In his late fifties, Uncle Chris was in trouble. He
was out of work with a severe drinking problem and
evicted from his trailer. My mom found places for him
to live and was paying his rent, but because of
the drinking and other issues, he was kicked out of
both places before the end of each month. As a
last resort, Chris managed to scrape together some cash and
(19:21):
bought a plane ticket to Panama to move in with
my grandparents. And you were saying that Chris hated Panama.
Speaker 5 (19:31):
He hated Panama with a passion, so Christopher again, because
he looked like Mama, looked more Latin. He was disenfranchised
by so many people. He wasn't feeling like he belonged
to the Americans, he didn't belong to the Panamanians. And
he just hated Panama because Mom wanted him to be
at the Union Club and wanted him to make friends there,
and those people wanted nothing to do with him. And
then the Canal Zone, they all thought, oh, you're ld,
we don't want you. So he never felt connected. He
(19:54):
hated Panama. He always said he hated it, and it
was only sheer desperation that he went back there lost everything.
Speaker 1 (20:03):
Do you know about that story? Did I tell you
about it at some point or I.
Speaker 6 (20:06):
Think you told me about it? And from what I recall,
you were staying in his house. But then some friends
were staying in his house, and one of his friends
was called Kittycat or something. Yep, and you could hardly
swip That's what I remember.
Speaker 1 (20:21):
This is my cousin Antonio. He lives in Panama, currently
in his mid twenties. He is the oldest of my
three cousins that were born and raised in Panama. He
speaks Spanish, English, and Chinese. He's a pretty impressive guy.
What's your first memory of Uncle Chris? Because I know
he was in the States for a long time, so
when was the first time you actually met him.
Speaker 6 (20:42):
I guess my first memory would be I think he
was in Panama and he had like a scar on
his shoulder or something, and I asked him, Hey, Uncle Chris,
what's that about. I was like, oh, I got shot here.
I was like, really no, I just hid myself with something.
But that's what I tell the girls. That's my first memory.
Speaker 2 (21:02):
I think.
Speaker 6 (21:02):
I remember I liked him. I thought it was cool.
Speaker 1 (21:05):
Antonio would end up spending a lot of time with
Uncle Chris when he returned to Panama.
Speaker 6 (21:09):
The reason he came back it is because he was
an alcoholic and I think in the States he was
getting detox, but then he fell into drinking and he
couldn't work because his hips were screwed up, so he
couldn't like walk or run, so he was really bored,
and he didn't know anybody here, so he didn't like
(21:31):
it being here.
Speaker 1 (21:35):
Chris was receiving a small amount of money through disability,
but most of it was spent on booze and cigarettes.
At this point, the situation with my grandparents was already chaotic.
My grandmother, Raquel, was roughly fifteen years into Alzheimer's and
had no clue who she was or what was happening.
She had trouble eating, sleeping, and using the bathroom. My
(21:56):
grandfather was just starting to show signs of dementia and
was practically deaf, mostly blind, and suffering from COPD, which
made it hard for him to breathe. Panama doesn't have
the best infrastructure for elder care, and both my grandparents
needed in house caretakers. On top of that, the house
and the yard were falling apart, literally being reclaimed by
(22:17):
the jungle, so my mom had to take care of
everything from Minnesota. It was a full time job for years.
She would spend hours on the phone every day dealing
with caretakers, doctors, nurses, landscapers, contractors. It was already a
nightmare for her, and the addition of Chris to the
mix would make things even more complicated. My mom started
(22:38):
getting calls from the neighbors. Chris was loud and was
leaving cigarette butts all over the place. His drinking was
out of control. He would pass out on the sidewalk
or in my grandparents' front yard. There was one time
where my grandpa had to actually drag him inside. It
was a lot for everyone.
Speaker 6 (22:57):
Grandpa didn't like Chris. I mean, you liked to he
just didn't like him here.
Speaker 5 (23:02):
Dad was frustrated because he didn't want him down there
because he was drinking, and Dad didn't want that.
Speaker 6 (23:07):
He was always showing him out. You know, Grandpa was
a little rough.
Speaker 1 (23:11):
I've only known him as like super nice grandpa, but
my understanding is he's spent more of his life not
being super nice Grandpa.
Speaker 6 (23:17):
It was really good with your mom, really mad with
the other ones, and Chris actually really liked Grandpa. He
told me I'm glad he was my dad. I wouldn't
want to be raised by some permissive dad. That's worse like,
I really liked him as a dad.
Speaker 5 (23:31):
He was always worried about my dad, and my dad
was mean to him, and that's what broke my heart.
And Christopher was always worried, you know, He's like, I
can do the Heimlich maneuver, dad's choked twice or Lapita.
The oxygen machine isn't working right. I was like, stay
away from the oxygen. You don't know what you're doing.
Don't get involved with it. And then the caretaker would
call and say, your brother fooled around with the ball
(23:52):
on the oxygen thing and it's not working.
Speaker 4 (23:54):
So it was it was always.
Speaker 5 (23:55):
I was always yelling at him, and I feel bad
about that.
Speaker 1 (23:59):
After my uncle arrived, my mom made a point to
go down there as soon as possible. She was worried
about her parents and worried about her brother. She realized
that he was in a really dark place.
Speaker 4 (24:09):
He was suicidal. He wanted to kill himself.
Speaker 5 (24:11):
I went down there and my dad had his closet
that he locked up, and he had two shotguns, a rifle,
a couple of pistols, a ton of ammunition, a machete,
you know, all things that you need to defend yourself.
Speaker 1 (24:26):
Remember at this point, my grandpa was over ninety years
old and practically blind, so an arsenal in the closet
was something that my mom had been worried about for
a while.
Speaker 5 (24:34):
I said, Daddy, show me what you would do if
someone comes in the house and you're going to get
a gun and he unlocks the door, he can barely
see it, opens it and he leans in to get
the rifle, and I just push him gently onto the
bed and he falls in, and I was like, Dad,
you're dead, You're done. So of course he did not
appreciate my assistance in showing him how inepty was. He
(24:55):
said a few curse words at me, threw the rifle
at me, and restored out of the room.
Speaker 6 (25:02):
Mew.
Speaker 5 (25:03):
The first thing I did, I threw all the weapons away.
My dad had a friend, and I said, throw him
in the ocean. I don't care what I'm out of here.
And one of them was apparently my Abuelito's prize pistol
that he brought the colonel back with.
Speaker 1 (25:15):
Yeah, that's right. A part of Panamanian history now rests
at the bottom of the ocean.
Speaker 5 (25:20):
So they were all mad at me, and I was like,
the kids suicidal he's sleeping in the room with the weapons.
Speaker 4 (25:25):
Come on, guys, give me a break.
Speaker 1 (25:27):
So he was suicidal and that's why he went. But
then that did he stop that.
Speaker 4 (25:31):
Talk or you know what, he was depressed.
Speaker 5 (25:34):
You have to take someone seriously if they say they
want to kill themselves, you can't. Just what I learned
when I work in the school system. She's supposed to
ask if you have a plan, and he didn't seem
to have one.
Speaker 4 (25:45):
But Christopher never had a plan, so it's.
Speaker 6 (25:47):
Like, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 (25:52):
The relationship my mom had with Chris was very different
from the one Antonio had with him. My mom had
been taking care of Chris for so much of his
life that by the time he showed up in Panama,
there was so much history and so much baggage that
she didn't have any patients left for. Antonio, on the
other hand, just got to spend time with Uncle Chris,
hanging out, running errands, shooting the shit.
Speaker 6 (26:13):
So I would see him like almost every weekend. I
was his errand boy. Basically I took him to the
groceries he used to call me. We would talk about
all movies and politics, but probably not popular opinions.
Speaker 1 (26:29):
Yeah, he's the first person who told me about lizard people.
Speaker 6 (26:32):
Oh I didn't mention that, but I can see him
believing that. You know, I never laugh at people that
believe in those stuff, because maybe it turns out to
be true. I don't know if it's a saying in English,
but broken clock works twice a day something like that.
Speaker 1 (26:48):
Yeah, what's the saying in Spanish? It's the same thing,
sounds better in Spanish. So Uncle Chris, because he had
such a thick southern accent, did that Gordon do a
Spanish at all?
Speaker 6 (27:02):
No, Like every gringo sounds the same when they speak Spanish. Really,
it sounds the same.
Speaker 1 (27:07):
Don'dstal of biblioteca?
Speaker 6 (27:09):
Yeah? Yeah, I just like that.
Speaker 1 (27:11):
Yeah, Antonio heard all sorts of fun and crazy stories
from Uncle Chris.
Speaker 6 (27:16):
Oh yeah, a bunch of funny stories. I remember he
was telling me about how he was a bounty hunter
for a time.
Speaker 1 (27:23):
Do you think he actually was a bounty hunter? Do
you think he's making it up?
Speaker 6 (27:26):
I can see him as a bounty hunter. Yeah, I
could see it too.
Speaker 1 (27:31):
Apparently Chris's time as a bounty hunter was short lived.
He was happy to taze people, but some of the
guys he was working with preferred to use guns and
liked shooting the guns, so Chris was worried that they
might get him arrested if he stuck around. This was
a perfect segue for me to tell Antonio that I'd
heard Chris had actually killed some people. I told him
the story that Glenn told me in the car. Two
(27:52):
with a gun, two with his bare hands, one with
a knife. Curious what your thoughts are if that's true
or not. Did he ever mention any of those?
Speaker 6 (28:01):
I don't think so. I mean so the question is
if he killed people, would he be able to get
away with it? And five of them? That's tough.
Speaker 1 (28:14):
For the record, my mom also thinks the story is bullshit.
Speaker 4 (28:17):
It makes no sense.
Speaker 5 (28:18):
There is such a sweetness to Chris, and he could
turn anybody. He always talked a good story, and you
knew they weren't true.
Speaker 1 (28:25):
Chris would end up spending the last three years of
his life living with my grandparents in Panama. Somehow he
was able to get the drinking down to a more
manageable level, and overall things seemed to mellow out quite
a bit. At some point, Chris developed a bit of
a romantic relationship with my grandparents, next door neighbor, a
woman originally from Russia about uncle Chris's age. My mom
(28:47):
had gotten to know this neighbor over the years because
she lived next door and would help out with my grandparents.
But one day the complaints stopped.
Speaker 5 (28:54):
So when Christopher moved down there, she would not stop
sending me what zapps and complaining and calling because he
was littering, he was smelling.
Speaker 4 (29:01):
Up her area, he was leaving trash. The outside was
a mess. Da da da da da da.
Speaker 5 (29:06):
And I was calling Chris and yelling at him, and
I said, you can't be doing this.
Speaker 4 (29:10):
And it was a constant stress for me to keep
that gal happy.
Speaker 6 (29:14):
From what I know, at first she did not like him,
but then he seduced her and I guess, no, lo
Chris fashion.
Speaker 4 (29:24):
And everything's good.
Speaker 5 (29:25):
The maid's quick complaining to me about the caretakers quit complaining.
Speaker 1 (29:30):
Chris managed to get on a better form of disability
and was now receiving a little more money and started
ordering lots of dinners to the house. The nurses and
caretakers would report to my mom about the budding romance
that Chris was having with the Russian neighbor, and it.
Speaker 5 (29:43):
Would be over at her house in the backyard candlelight dinners.
So they were like all cracking up about this big romance.
Speaker 6 (29:53):
I think if you lift a bit more, it would
have left to something.
Speaker 1 (30:14):
It really did seem like he was starting a real relationship.
He seemed to be in a much better place than
he was when he got there. My grandparents' health was
in a constant state of decline, but for Uncle Chris,
things were looking okay until one of my uncles died unexpectedly.
My uncle Antonio's dad died suddenly of a heart attack
in December. A couple of days after that, Chris would
(30:36):
have his first heart attack. A few weeks later, in February,
my grandmother, Roquell died. Chris had another heart attack the
day after that and went to the hospital.
Speaker 5 (30:48):
On the thirteenth of February, Mama died, and I was
so relieved for her, because there was nothing left of her.
She may have weighed fifty pounds. She couldn't speak, she
couldn't swallow, she couldn't anything. She it was just nothing
but bones and no teeth, and oh, it just it
was heartbreaking.
Speaker 4 (31:06):
To watch her.
Speaker 5 (31:06):
And I don't know how she kept on live as
long as she did, and she died. And then on
the fifteenth, Christopher died, and it was like so much
all at once. And then my poor dad, with his dementia,
he couldn't comprehend. You know, we're all trying to not
(31:29):
tell Dad too much. We don't want to get him upset.
Speaker 1 (31:31):
No one had told my grandpa that Chris had had
another heart attack or that he was in the hospital.
That day, one of the nurses got the call that
Chris had died. She went to go check on my grandpa,
who was supposed to be taking his afternoon nap.
Speaker 5 (31:44):
She goes back in the room and she said, my dad,
who had been sound asleep, is sitting on the side
of the bed with his feet on the floor, looks
right at her, and he said, Roquel came and got
Christopher and they're not coming back. And then he laid
down and went back to sleep. It's so weird, but
so Latin.
Speaker 4 (32:03):
I mean, the Lat's all the America.
Speaker 1 (32:05):
I remember your your mom would have dreams.
Speaker 5 (32:09):
Yeah, so it's it's just like that's that's the spiritual
part of the Latin culture, you know, where they have that.
Speaker 4 (32:14):
So for Dad to do that was nuts.
Speaker 5 (32:16):
So when Daddy gets upset and it's crying about it,
I said, Daddy.
Speaker 4 (32:20):
Remember, Mom didn't even want.
Speaker 5 (32:22):
To go well because she didn't know what to do
about Christopher, how to take care of him when she died,
So she saw that she came to got.
Speaker 6 (32:31):
So.
Speaker 5 (32:31):
Anyhow, Mama's favorite son died, then she died, and then
she came back and got the one she worried the
most about.
Speaker 1 (32:39):
The details of Chris's death are a little complicated. First
and foremost, despite his fitness regimen, he was a chainsmoker
who bit the filters off of cigarettes and drank a lot,
which you know isn't good for the heart. A couple
of days after my other uncle died, Chris had his
first heart attack and went to the public hospital.
Speaker 5 (32:58):
He stayed there for two days, but when they wouldn't
let him have his cigarettes, he blew up and left.
He signed himself out and left.
Speaker 6 (33:06):
He started to have withdrawal symptoms from smoking. He can
smoke in the hospital, so he wanted to get out.
Speaker 1 (33:12):
Chris ended up signing some waivers that said he refused
care from the hospital and checked himself out. Afterwards, he
decided that the doctors didn't know what they were talking
about and that it wasn't a heart attack, it was
just heartburn. Less than a month later, when my Grandma
Raquel died, Chris was very upset.
Speaker 6 (33:29):
So he ordered a whole pizza and ate it at night,
and then that like gave his heart trouble and then
he had to go to the hospital.
Speaker 1 (33:39):
He was having another heart attack, and because he had
refused service at the previous public hospital, they wouldn't admit him.
His only option was to go to a private hospital.
They were able to stabilize him, but said they needed
to operate because he had a blockage in his heart,
but they wouldn't do anything until they received ten thousand
dollars up front.
Speaker 6 (33:57):
Because for COVID they had a policy where you have
to past ten thousand dollars before they could treat him.
Speaker 1 (34:04):
Ten thousand.
Speaker 6 (34:05):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (34:06):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (34:07):
It was chaotic, but my other uncle up in the
States was able to get the money down to Panama
the next day and Chris was able to get the operation.
Antonio was with him at the hospital and said that
Chris was really worried that the money wouldn't come through,
but once it finally did, he was relieved and ready
to get the operation. He seemed pretty calm about everything.
Speaker 6 (34:26):
It was fine up until then. He has a procedure
and then he dies and somehow they spent five ten
thousand dollars.
Speaker 1 (34:34):
Were you the last person who saw him?
Speaker 6 (34:36):
Yeah, I don't like that hospital. It feels like if
he had gone to another hospital, he might be a lot.
Speaker 5 (34:44):
I don't know what do you agree to or what happened.
Speaker 4 (34:46):
All I know is that he died on the operating table.
Speaker 5 (34:52):
And then we had him cremated. Mama was cremated, and
a month later we did a funeral service for him
and Mama together and they're buried in the same crypt
where my grandparents are buried.
Speaker 1 (35:05):
So Uncle Chris is now.
Speaker 4 (35:07):
In the country. He didn't want to ever go back
to who he's buried in.
Speaker 1 (35:14):
My mom remembered something Chris said to her at their
brother's funeral only weeks before he died, worried about either
of my grandparents passing away.
Speaker 4 (35:21):
Next, I can't handle two funerals close together. It'll kill me.
And I thought, wow, you did. You got two together
and you killed you.
Speaker 1 (35:31):
My uncle Chris is buried at the Santuario Nacional de
Corrazon de Maria It's a beautiful old Spanish style church
in the heart of Panama City. After my uncle, my grandma,
and Chris died, my Grandpa's dementia became much worse. He
would wake up every morning trying to find Raquel, forgetting
that she had passed away, and every day my mom
(35:53):
had to call him on the phone and tell him
that she was gone. He died a year and a
half later, and I was able to go down to
the funeral and watch as they put his cremated remains
in the same crypt, along with my grandmother and my
uncle Chris. Their names now among many of the names
of the Valdez family, all in a special VIP section
of the crypt designated for the founding families of Panama.
(36:19):
Is there anything you wish you could have done different?
Speaker 5 (36:21):
Or I wish I'd had a lot more patience with
Chris those last three years he was in Panama. I
was always angry at him because I felt like he
was making it hard for my parents, he was making
it hard for me, he was making it hard for
the neighbor. You know. It's just like I was trying
to please all these different people when truthfully, screw it.
(36:43):
You know, I don't have a lot of regrets. I
don't at all, but that is a little one to have.
Wouldn't have killed me to have more time to listen
to him. I was like, all right, Chris gotta go,
and he was lonely. He would call because he was lonely,
But then he talks so much stupidity, so I could
never really have a conversation with him. So maybe I'm
just being too sentimental thinking that things could have been different,
(37:06):
because we're both grown people and very different.
Speaker 1 (37:10):
This whole project's kind of sentimental because he was who
he was, and the only version of him I know
is the version of him I have in my head. Yeah,
but that sweetness about him, and it seems like a
lot of other.
Speaker 5 (37:22):
People I think, so as we've talked about him, I
think you're right, because I why would a garbage company pay.
Speaker 4 (37:29):
Twice for him to go to rehab?
Speaker 1 (37:30):
Right?
Speaker 4 (37:31):
Why would they care?
Speaker 5 (37:32):
I just feel like they could see that under all
that bluster, it was a kind, gentle soul. But life
had taught him to be rough and tough and crude
and tough sounding, you know, which was sad because he
was such a sweet little boy.
Speaker 1 (37:51):
My uncle Chris had a huge impact on my life,
even though I only ever saw him a handful of times.
He lived a hard, lonely life, and I think he
deserved much better. It seemed like an uphill battle from
day one, and just when things finally started to make
a turn for the better, he met his tragic end.
The night I stayed on my uncle Chris's trailer. There
(38:12):
was a naive kid who thought I was ready to
go out and find my place in the world, whatever
that meant. In the nearly twenty years since then, I've
learned that the world means different things to different people,
and who you are in it isn't entirely up to you.
For each of us, our lives are a personal journey, hopes,
dreams and goals that we want to accomplish, problems that
(38:34):
we want to solve, feelings that we want to avoid.
But eventually you won't be here anymore, and whatever your
inner thoughts and personal experiences were, they'll be gone forever,
and all that will be left of you are the
stories that someone remembers you telling, or the stories that
someone else tells about you. Those stories will be told
(38:58):
from the perspective of someone Hitch viking with you through Nebraska,
a guy filming a documentary about you and your friends
on the Mississippi, a kid running past you to avoid
sniper fire, or a nephew who spent one night in
your trailer. Depending on the story, you'll be an asshole,
(39:20):
a hero, an adventurer, a victim, maybe even a pirate.
None of us know what the story of our life
will be when we're gone, so try your best to
make it a good one. Thank you so much for
(39:50):
listening to this podcast. I want to give special thanks
to everyone who shared their stories, Marcus, Matt, Bill and Turner, Antonio, Aggi, Demetrius,
and of course my mom and I want to give
a special shout out to Glenn and Kitty Kat wherever
they are, and really big thanks to my uncle Chris
wherever he is. I'd like to give some special thanks
(40:27):
to Brent Kaiser and Unbridled Sound for their very generous
assistance and advice throughout this whole process, the patients and
support of my wife and kids for all the time
I spent in the basement putting this thing together, and
especially to you the listener, if you've made it this
far all the way to the end, thank you so
much for listening. Uncle Chris is a production by Will
Ferrell's Big Money Players Network and iHeart Podcasts. It's created
(40:50):
and hosted by me Ian faff I, wrote, directed, scored,
edited and mixed this episode. The show is executive produced
by Hans Sanhi and Will Ferrell, co produced by Olivia Aguilar.
If you want to see what else I'm up to,
go to eanfaf dot com or check out my Instagram.
Spring Break nineteen eighty four
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