"He'll never amount to anything."

When my Uncle Jerry was a young boy, a teacher told his mother -- my Granny Mary -- that "he'll never amount to anything."

Why she said that, I don't know.  Maybe it was because he didn't know how to tie his shoes yet (a skill which, by the way, I didn't learn until I was eight.) My father stepped in and tied my uncle's shoes . . . while my uncle read a comic book. (He couldn't tie his shoes yet, but he could read!)

But he spent the rest of his nearly 82 years of life proving her wrong.

My Uncle Jerry was born in Harlan, Kentucky in November of 1939, into a world that was just beginning World War II. He was the youngest of five children, and too young to remember the personal tragedy that hit nearly two years later, when his father was killed in an accident. 

He grew up in a world without a father, and in a world shaped by World War II and its aftermath. 

I don't know what made him pick electrical engineering as a path in life. But Harlan, Kentucky was not the place to do it. 

So he went to college and eventually earned his doctorate at the University of Cincinnati. Cincinnati was a popular place for people from rural Kentucky to end up. One of his big brothers was already there. (Two of my mother's siblings also moved from Harlan to Cincinnati.) 

His doctoral dissertation had something to do with neutron-irradiated silicone. As an adult, I worked at a university library and used their interlibrary loan computer to look up Uncle Jerry's dissertation. When I found it, I read off the title to the other woman working at the reference desk.  She just looked at me and said, "Sure!"

The boy who would "never amount to anything" eventually moved to Clearwater, Florida, got a job at Honeywell, and taught engineering at the University of South Florida. He also traveled worldwide, visiting countries such as Israel, Japan, and Poland. I remember the slide shows he would have when he'd come back from one of his trips. I still have a pin he gave me after a trip to Moscow, an Olympic pin with "Mockba '80", It was the Olympics that the US ended up boycotting. 

Uncle Jerry would eventually live from coast to coast doing consulting work. He's lived in Colorado Springs, Bellingham, WA, Palmyra, New York (where he lived on what he described as "23 acres of weeds") and finally in Sarasota, Florida.

He and my father were very close, as befits the last two members of a family.  He once said about my dad that "he was my hero before I ever knew about heroes." 

My father fell ill with ALS in 1992, My now-husband proposed in May of 1993, and I knew there was a chance my father might not live to see me get married. 

So I wrote Uncle Jerry and asked, if Daddy can't give me away, can you?

He called me and said three words:  "I'd be honored."

My father died on September 11th, 1993. I was married on October 9, 1993, with my Uncle Jerry walking me down the aisle.  He also loaned Frank his wedding ring for our pictures because I had forgotten to bring Frank's. That is a funny story now. Then, it was tragic.

After his first marriage ended, he married again in May of 1980 to a woman who made him happy for many years. That marriage also brought him three stepchildren.  He had no biological children, but he stepped in as a father figure. 

It devastated my Uncle Jerry when his wife died several years ago. 

The last time I saw Uncle Jerry was right before my mother died.  He came to see her on the same day I did.  He told met, through tears, that you knew you were getting old when you started losing the people you loved. 

Uncle Jerry loved his work and contributed much. My father told me that Jerry was one of maybe ten people in the country that knew what he knew. 

In the end, all he wanted to do was go home. 

His health would not permit him to go back to Harlan, so he settled for assisted living in Ohio. It helped that his sister-in-law was at the same facility.  

Just a few days ago, I learned that he had a wound on his foot that was not healing. He made the choice to refuse amputation and signed paperwork for hospice care. He was going to leave the world on his own terms. 

Last night, at 11:15 p.m., October 20, 2021, he did just that. 

His stepdaughter, who's spent time and energy and love caring for him and keeping the family informed, told us that Uncle Jerry's body will be cremated and the ashes spread at Cumberland Falls, Kentucky, a place he enjoyed taking his grandkids (the children of one of his stepdaughters). 

So in a way, he will go home.

My uncle, Dr. Jerry Sergent, will be remembered as an engineer who traveled the world sharing his knowledge and who gave his knowledge to his many students. 

He will be remembered as a man who would live life on his own terms.  

He loved his family, his brothers and sister and sisters-in-law, and his nieces and nephews. 

Quite an accomplishment for someone who was never supposed to amount to anything.

Just my .04, adjusted for inflation.