Heros die.

My Uncle Ralph was my hero, and he died last month.

We talked about death a lot, maybe because I’m a doctor. Because I predicted — wrongly, it turns out — that he’d live a lot longer. He once said he hoped he would live a long life because he really loved living.

He loved to work and to laugh, and he loved his wife, Elvira, whom he knew and loved since they were teenagers. He loved long afternoon meals with his family. He loved pie and milk chocolate with nuts and he loved to argue. OK, not argue, but “discuss” things. Loudly. And stubbornly. He’d sit in his spot at the table, and he would weigh in on every subject, from “stupid” politicians to how mayonnaise ruins potato salad. Often the conversation with me would get around to talking about his heart attack, his health, how long he’d live.

“I just love this — eating, sitting and talking. This life,” he told me on many occasions. “I don’t want to leave it.”

He was a hands-on guy, a builder who figured things out, usually at 6 a.m. in bed, while the rest of his family was asleep, and then at breakfast he’d lay out his solutions to a plumbing, electrical or building project. He was usually right. Hard work, farming and experience as a builder taught him a lot.

When I was a pre-med student taking physics, I talked about the theory of relativity and time, as related to the speed of light, and the mathematical possibility of time travel.

“That’s just a bunch of bull----!” he shouted at me, his voice echoing off the hard ceramic tiles he’d just put in his kitchen. If he couldn’t see it or figure it, he wasn’t buying it. “Come work on the farm, and you’ll learn all the physics you will need to know.”

As for an afterlife? He didn’t worry too much about it, because Jesus, he said, is known as a good and forgiving and generous deity, and Uncle Ralph, who was the most good and the most forgiving and the most generous man I have known, said that love and forgiveness are their own reward. He wasn’t sure if there really is an afterlife, he told me, but then he looked almost sheepish and said softly, “But I hope there is one.”

Doctors are more accustomed to seeing people die, watching the passage of life like watching a river flow from its bank. Of course, I can’t be that objective with my uncle. With him dead, it seems unreal that the house he built still stands, that the trees still rustle in the wind and that the beauty of summer gardens — let alone his summer garden — bear their bounty. That common sense he so loved fails to explain how it can be that he is not able to sit among us at the table and talk politics or explain how to spray apple trees or water the tomatoes or argue about the Infinite.