Zero to Sixty
Turns out family is complicated. I want to say, “the bigger it is, the more complicated a family is,” but I’m not sure that’s always true, really — some of the most-complicated families I’ve known have been relatively small. I also don’t think the Anna Karenina principle is all that accurate, either: even happy families are complicated and weird. I know mine is.
My mom’s younger brother died yesterday. We weren’t close. In fact, we were about as un-close as it was possible for two guys who lived 20 miles apart and shared a lot of ancestors to be. This morning, I was on the phone with my mom, and we were trying to suss out when the last time we saw him was. She said she’d seen him three years ago, at a funeral. It was his birthday. The encounter was brief. Me? I think the last time I saw him was at a wedding, in about 2003 or ’04. We were both a little drunk.
Why weren’t we close? Part of it is that I’m just not close with people, really. Part of it is that he teased me when I was a kid, I think because he noticed I was extremely suceptible to teasing and the whole galaxy of older-male behaviors that it lives in; I would turn red, and yell, and eventually come to the point of tears. I still don’t like it very much; when people feel like they have the right to fuck with me it pisses me off. I’m not completely sure on the chain of causality there, but the waters run swift and deep on that one. And then, beyond my own borderline sociopathy and our fraught relationship as young people (he was still in high school when I was born), there was some very heavy business between him and the rest of his siblings, business I’ve never quite understood. I’m not going to go too deeply into that, because it feels disrespectful to plumb those depths so soon after his death, but suffice it to say that I was not unique in being largely estranged from him.
When I was young, and he still lived at my grandparents’ house, my uncle had a cat he’d named Cookie. Cookie is also my mom’s name (well, nickname, really, but it’s what everybody calls her). This was no mere synchronicity. In the way of many big families, the older kids in my mom’s generation were tasked with stewardship over younger ones, and my uncle came under my mom’s care. They enjoyed one another’s company so much that when a stray cat wandered up to the back door, my uncle named her in tribute to my mom. I’ve been told that when she came home from college, the first thing she would do was huddle with her little brother and exchange all the important news of their lives. Maybe that’s why he teased me so relentlessly — I took his place. Or maybe that’s reading to deeply into the business. I don’t know. Anyhow, I’ve tried to put myself in my mom’s shoes, and in my uncle’s shoes, to understand what it would be like to have a relationship that was once so close go poof one day. And then to have the possibility of ever getting it back foreclosed. I have the good fortune to have difficulty imagining that.
This is all by way of saying that I can’t properly eulogize the man, because I didn’t really know him anymore. When he was young he was famously devil-may-care about everything — money, time, goals, girls, you name it. In pictures he has a big shock of wavy, reddish-blonde hair, and is usually in some surreptitious way having a joke: in the one I remember best, he’s riding shotgun in my dad’s convertible VW Bug, smiling along with the rest of the crew . . . with his right hand dangling down below the door, so that only the camera can see his middle finger proudly extended. I always thought that picture was funny. There was an aspect of the lovable scamp about him in those days. He was often grinning in a way that indicated he knew something you didn’t.
I can’t imagine that being a fun-loving rebel was the easiest thing to do in the house he grew up in; he was the only son of a big, tough, difficult, and very successful father, who was known to have little time for bullshit and time-wasting. In that kind of an environment, actively pursuing bullshit and time-wasting becomes something noble, I think. There actually is value in letting older people know that you don’t care about their rules and refuse to live by their standards. Even if you eventually become one of them, as my uncle did, as I am doing, as we all should be so lucky to do.
Funny how I asserted at the beginning that Tolstoy was wrong about happy families, and then went on to detail the ways in which my family, which I think of as mostly a happy one, was in some ways not happy at all. I don’t know. I guess don’t think happiness is binary, or something.
But anyway, today I’m remembering my uncle, who died yesterday, aged just 53. He was an imp and a joker, the son of a tough father, the younger brother of five sisters, the father of two daughters. I always believed that our estrangement would end one day; today I mourn the fact that it didn’t. Super perfundo, RWC. You are missed.