Recounting life as it slips away

He’s been holding court for several days now, his voice tired and thin, the end near. We stand over him, leaning forward, listening to that great mind starting to unwind.

The surprising part is that for years one almost had to major in my Cousin Bobby to really understand him. He spoke in a spitfire sputter, his mouth unable to keep pace with his thoughts. Those of us who idolize this unyielding and eccentric character hang now on his every word.

The medication has slowed him, so the stories flow unfettered. The Normandy Invasion. The Battle of the Bulge. The return to Harvard. The battles with Harvard. The March on Washington. The marches around the A&P, for selling nonunion lettuce.

Or maybe it’s that I know all these stories by heart. I cherish them as if they are part of me, which they are. Robert Carlton Paul will tell you that he is 84 and 5/6ths. He doesn’t expect to see 85. He is in a Boston hospital with an aggressive lymphoma, but the good news - and it is, really - is that his kidneys will likely fail first. That, we’re told, is a better way to go. “My mother said to live your life with dignity and to die with dignity,” he said.

As much as it hurts to say the words, Cousin Bobby is doing just that.

A dutiful son For most of his life he lived with his mother, my Aunt Ethel, a widow for half a century and a fellow “traditional radical,” as Bobby puts it. Once 14 relatives shared a cramped white house on the main street of town. Not an easy household. Argument was the family sport.

Now no one interrupts as Bobby, weary but appreciating the audience, apologizes to those who dropped everything to come say goodbye, and says that he will miss us. His biggest regret? That he never married. At the thought of his loneliness, I have to look away.

A couple of Bobby stories: Walking along the beach, past the cottage in Dennisport, passersby would often peer through a picture window to see my cousin on his bed, reading. Then their eyes would find his poster, from the Realist magazine, which read: “*#%@” Communism. " To the occasional red-faced beachcomber, Bobby would explain that the rage was misplaced: Communism was actually the obscenity.

The second story comes from 2004, the morning after the Red Sox ended their 86-year World Series drought. Bobby hadn’t watched the final out, or any of them, he said when I called to celebrate with him. Although he’d taken my brother and me to games, he’d stopped rooting in 1949, when two pitchers from the hated Yankees - Vic Raschi and Allie Reynolds - caused an unbearable Red Sox fold. Too much pain. Bobby said he felt happy for the team, the same way he felt on snow days, when the firehouse horn signaled no school, when Bobby’s toes still danced in bed.

Rooting for the home team, he reminded me, isn’t always the right thing to do. “Sometimes the home team is your country, and they are not always right,” he said. “Sometimes they fight the wrong wars. "

My last story is the freshest, from the morning after Barack Obama won the presidency. “He is only the second person I voted for for president who actually won,” Bobby said. Really? He’d backed Truman and then a series of windmill tilters from the unabashed left: Fred Harris, Benjamin Spock, Barry Commoner.

It took only 60 years for the world to come around again to Bobby’s side.

There are four of us by his bed now, my wife, a cousin, her friend, and me. Bobby gets in a last warning about patriotism - how it’s the last refuge of a scoundrel. Only this time, he adds that not all patriots are scoundrels.

This is a new twist, a course change in this lifelong curriculum of conscience. This is how I think I will remember him, his hospital gown slipped from his shoulder like a toga, a warrior for what he feels in his heart, seizing the final days.

Contact staff writer Daniel Rubin at 215-528-2154 or drubin@phillynews.com