He had already been in hospital for three weeks and was due to have a kidney removed. Then the operation was off. That was all I knew. It was off. Postponed or cancelled? I asked, as if I was talking about a football match. Then I heard the words down the phone. Scan, tumour, growth. These are complex words with multiple meanings. It had to be spelled out to me. Me, who knows so much about the indexicality and contextuality of human language. Me with all that education, as he liked to say. I went to see him a week and a bit later with a tape recorder in my carrier bag. My father died suddenly after what was supposed to be routine surgery and without appearing to be ill. My brother died in a climbing accident. I didn't want to let my uncle go without reflection.

I needed to talk, about our home in Northern Ireland, about the changes there, about the Peace, about my father, a man I can hardly remember, and how I was becoming the spitting image of him. At last. His girlfriend, Marjorie, brought me to see him. My mother always refers to Marjorie as his girlfriend. It's a strange term given that she is 82 and he is 77. Terence and Marjorie had been inseparable for 12 years or so, after my uncle's wife, Agnes, who was my mother's sister, died. My mother was always a little resentful of his second relationship. "Look who's come to see you, Terry," Marjorie said. "So you got here then," he said, looking up at me. "You've arrived at last." He was always commenting on me being late for everything. "What time do you call this?" he would say, after I had driven across England to see him.

"The Beatties are always late," he would say. My mother likes to tell the story of the day the whole street thought that we were dead in our beds because the woman who rapped us for work and school couldn't raise us. "The Beatties would sleep all day," he liked to say, "if you let them." He was an early riser. He was sitting on a chair beside the bed, his bad leg up on a stool. He was just my uncle but he was always the man in my family. My father was too soft, my mother always said, not like Big Terry. Terence taught me to fish the streams coming off the mountains around Belfast, to fish with my hands. He would stand with his legs balanced on wet slimy stones in the middle of the bubbling mountain streams above Ligoniel and say: "Get your hands in under the rocks and tickle them. Tickle their bellies. Trout love having their bellies tickled."

Terence had also boxed in his younger days but now he was five stone or so over-weight, and every Saturday night when he and my father got back from Paddy's at the bottom of the street my dog Spot and I would be invited to take him on. He would sit down in our front room, heavy with drink, waiting for his supper, and beckon us towards him. `Come on, get stuck in', he would say. The dog would bite him in the neck and on the back, I would club his large, heavy head with my fists. The dog would only ever go for the big fella like that when he could smell the drink from him. So would I. But he was the big fella all my life, and not just on Saturdays after closing time.

Not long after my father died, Terence left for England to work. So every summer I went to Chippenham to live with him and get some holiday work, and he would slap sun-tan cream on my back with those large, manly hands to protect me from the sun of southern England as I set off for another day on a building site in Bath or Bristol. He had left Belfast because he always said that his promotion was blocked in the Civil Service because of his religion. He was a Catholic in the Belfast of the 1960s: the days of unionist rule. He moved to England and got his promotion. I followed him for the school holidays and came back to Belfast knowing all about ska and reggae, and things which never seemed to reach Belfast in those days. It was natural for me to go back across the water for university when the time came. I always think that Northern Ireland lost two of its own. One from each side, one Taig and one Prod, so I suppose that's fair. It was some sort of balance.

In hospital, he sat on the chair by his bed, full of a confused fury. "I want to go home," he said. He did not want to be there. He asked me how the family was, but he seemed to be distracted, as if he couldn't wait on the answer. He had asked the doctor, who had given him his diagnosis of cancer, how long he had got left, but the doctor had told him that it was hard to say. All the talk was about who could look after him at home. All the talk was of the future. The illness was not mentioned.

Ten days later, Terence lay back in bed on the side ward he had been moved to, his head lolling. His girlfriend was feeding him yoghurt which leaked out the side of his mouth. He already had the look of death about him: a vacuum where his teeth once were; the eyebrows calmed from the fury the last time I saw him. "Terry O'Niell" it said above the bed. The surname was spelt wrongly.

His girlfriend reluctantly said that she had to go. She had been there all day and was exhausted. I said that I wanted to stay. I sat in the room pleased to be alone with him. I could hear the hum of conversation from down the corridor, occasionally a child's voice. I sat watching his chest rise and fall rhythmically, but shallowly. His nose hairs needed trimming.

My mind was on all the private deaths in my family. It was he my uncle who stopped me as a 13-year-old boy going in to see my father in hospital the night he died in the Royal in Belfast. He stopped me and my Aunt Agnes in the car park. I knew it was bad news. He wouldn't look at me.

He was there in our front room in Legmore Street much later when we had the service for my brother who lay below a pile of loose stones on a Himalayan mountain, but he crept up to our back room for a sneaky cry. I caught him up there with his back to the door. Shielding his sorrow.

He never liked showing any emotion in life, except perhaps anger and impatience. But they are manly emotions, that's what I always think. Sometimes I think that I learned a lot from him and not just about fishing and fighting with your bare hands. I wanted to talk to him, but I didn't want to listen to my own voice in that quiet room. I have always been very self-conscious like that. I glanced into the blackened mid-winter sky hoping to see some distant stars but all I could see were some lights through a fog out the back of the hospital. I thought about what kind of man I have become and what my children will remember about me in 30 or 40 years' time. A few frozen moments, a cross word here or there, a holiday perhaps. Not much.

I glanced around the room that I thought looked a little bare and then I noticed what was missing. He was always religious. He had all these little religious symbols back in Belfast. Symbols that I had to hide from my friends back in north Belfast. But here there were none. He was given the last rites the night before but now there was no sign of any Virgin Mary or Christ on the cross or anything much. Just a bare hospital room with a few cards and a few private possessions like slippers, but nothing more than that.

I wanted to discuss the Peace Process with him, now that things were different. But I was too late. I was always too late for everything. That's what he always said. We only discussed my father once, and that was about a year ago. He said that I had shown no inclination to talk about my father after he died. He said that I just pulled the shutters down; I just closed the door. I've closed a lot of doors since then.

And the Troubles. We never discussed them. He always said that one side was as bad as the other, and we left it at that. I don't think that I ever admitted to him that I knew that he was a Catholic. I had been told a few years ago by my mother that he hadn't been allowed into the house of another of my uncles, who was a staunch loyalist, for nearly 40 years. Forty f***ing years. The years of madness, I call them.

I knew that he had only hours to live - I could sense it - but the staff nurse persuaded me that he was stable and that nothing would happen that night. So I left for the long drive home, and he died three hours later. And I never did get the chance to talk to him. Always late, that's my problem. He could have told you that. Always f***ing late.