If there's a top ten list of reasons why I write, comic relief takes the top spot, we all know that. It's my personal balm to the soul, always with the hope that it rubs off on other souls that need it as much as or more than I do.
Unfortunately, a lot of what's been going on around me in my little corner of existence is just...well it's just not frickin funny. It has its moments, don't get me wrong, and I know I'll get to those eventually, because they really do just write themselves.
But overall, it's just much too much...and not funny.
A month or so ago, I was trick-or-treating with Mike and the kids and a passel of neighborhood urchins when my cell phone rang with a call that made for the weirdest, surrealest Halloween of my life. It was my mom, and I knew I had to take the call and not smash the phone on the pavement...as if smashing the phone would mean I wouldn't get the news I knew was coming, that her brother, my Uncle Dan, had died. (This, by the way, is the kind of uncle that you would rather NOT be your uncle, so that you could grow up and marry him one day. Ask any of his other nieces and they'll back me up.)
Anyway, we'd all gotten the 24-36 hour warning from the kind hospice people, but that doesn't take the wallop out of it one little bit. And then, scarcely a week later, with no time for anyone to catch a breath or find the earth under their feet again, we lost a second one. This time it was my cousin Kevin, who'd been in the care of yet another set of kind hospice people, and so came another load of gutwrenching heartbreak, once again not unexpected, and once again a full-out punch in the gut just the same.
People who live close enough had been making the rounds of one hospice to the other...because all of us who love one of them, also love the other. Both were young and vibrant men, but then cancer came in and did its hideous thing, leaving broken hearts in pieces all around. Countless hands to hold. Tears that never stop flowing because once you've calmed down over the one for a minute or two, your mind goes to the other. This is going to be a long haul.
I want to be able to explain it, the cords of connection interweaving all the players, all the events. It would take volumes and volumes. I don't know where to start. My mother is the oldest of eight. So it was like this...beginning in their late teens, my incredibly movie-star gorgeous grandparents couldn't keep their hands off each other, plus they're from Buffalo, and it gets plenty cold in those parts and what better way to keep warm...in those parts.
Fast forward six short decades and you need a score card to keep track of us all. I do not exaggerate...ok so you all know I do, but not in this case. I think the family crest reads "Horny and Fertile" in Latin, I'll have to doublecheck. I always pity the poor inlaws (also affectionately known as nonbloods) when they join this clan...the frenzied mental gymnastics they do as they try to keep up on who's who at the barbecue, the disorientation written all over their faces, it's kind of adorable. Pretty soon they smarten up and just have another beer. There's no quiz at the end of the night. Just a bonfire, massive amounts of laughter...and more beer.
Some people don't know their uncles, aunts, cousins, etc., very well I guess. In some families they're just relations people enjoy (or not) being cordial to (or not) at weddings and funerals and family reunions. It's not that way in my clan. I grew up living for the day we'd pack up the family truckster and go to them and get swallowed up in a sea of affection that smelled like coffee and cigarettes...and maybe a highball. To this day it still happens. My heart starts to skip around and my stomach swims with butterflies when we turn at Ilio DiPaolo's Restaurant (so we'll be on the right side of the street for parking), now just mere blocks away from the house on Madison Avenue, Blasdell, NY 14219, one square mile of heaven, just like the T-shirts say.
My grandfather still lives there, a spritely 82, but don't tell him I said "spritely" because he'll only deny it. My grandmother, Rosemary, is there too, harder to see but if you pay attention you'll know she's there, and for an extra bonus you may smell good tobacco that nobody appears to be smoking, or the fluid from a Zippo lighter that nobody appears to have lit, or a rose will bloom in the yard after the first frost has set in...seriously, pay attention, I don't make this stuff up.
But getting back to Halloween, my sweet, gorgeous, hilarious, beloved Uncle Dan died that afternoon, an event I like to call part of the biggest sackload of suck to ever hit my family. So I packed my things and headed west to be with my people. While I was there, I went to the place where the kind hospice people were still taking care of Kevin. I got to hold his hand, tell him how beautiful and loved he is, and look into his eyes so bright and alive they took my breath away. That was a privilege I won't ever forget. I can still feel the life that was filling that room, and I didn't even have to close my eyes to see how quietly crowded it was in there.
We want certain kinds of miracles when people are threatening to die, specifically, we want them to NOT die. My Uncle Dan should have lived to 100 at the very least. Sixty-three measly years, we've been gypped bigtime. He was too good to be true, but he WAS true, and we don't get enough of those on this planet for my money. Therefore, we should get to keep him, end of story.
And Kevin, don't even get me started. Forty-four years old, are you kidding me? Hell-raising wise ass, lovingest father of the best and funnest family ever, six amazing kids, the youngest a little 3-year old baby. All that, and my cousin Missy had to watch him sicken, waste away, and die, just like what had already happened to her mom, my godmother, my mother's baby sister Mary...just a few short years ago when SHE was just forty-four. You want the definition of NOT FAIR, I'll just send you a picture of my cousin Missy...who, by the way, has never faltered, just puts her head down and continues on like a warrior, taking care of the business of life and of love while a shit storm of nothing less than Biblical proportions rains down around her. If I hear myself complain about anything, I just think "Missy," then I shut my big fat everloving mouth.
So we didn't get the miracles we wanted for my uncle Dan and my cousin Kevin, not by a long shot. Instead we got a one-two punch right in the face and kick in the crotch. We feel abandoned, broken, empty, cheated. And we all hate it.
But...I don't know...you tell me if this counts as a miracle, because I really just don't know anymore. As I've walked amongst my tribe through all this hell on earth, I've felt something impossible in the midst of it all....
Joy.
A joy so huge and expansive I'm almost ashamed to admit it. But if this joy had no place in the thick of our sorrow, it apparently didn't get the memo, because it was there just the same and wouldn't be shown the door. It had hundreds of faces, this thing, this joy. One of them was Ellie's, she's my newborn baby cousin I got to meet for the first time, in a funeral home of all places. And as I cradled this newest friend in my arms, and she was gurgle-smiling up at me (and beyond me, too, I'm pretty sure) something drew my attention across the room where another face caught my eye.
It was my grandfather's face. Papa. Daniel. Resident patriarch, whom I'd just watched walk up to a casket to tenderly caress the hair of his first-born son, which just about forced all the air out of my lungs I can assure you. But Papa was seated now, and while I watched from across the room, baby Ellie in my arms, I saw something happen on his face that I couldn't..I couldn't fathom. I figured the stress had gotten to me and I was starting to hallucinate, no biggie. Because what I was seeing across the room was a face all aglow with...delight. And not just any kind of delight...it was a boy's delight, I swear to God. Just a few feet from that coffin I mentioned. He was being clapped on the back by some old-timer, a stranger to me, and then they were talking and laughing, heads close together like a couple of 9-year-old boys who'd just overturned a big boulder and were feasting their eyes on the dozens of squiggling critters underneath.
Turns out his tall stranger with his shock of white hair was a friend from Papa's youth, someone he'd probably never expected to see again, maybe would never even have thought of again...and then, as I shamelessly spied on them, awestruck and mesmerized and glued to the spot, they hugged each other like long lost friends who didn't care who was looking, their billion-watt smiles never fading.
I could barely catch my breath. It was like looking at the sun.
But you can't look at the sun for too long or you're in trouble, so luckily Ellie started making some noises. Hey, what happened, did you forget about me?
I looked her in the eyes and asked her, point blank, What the hell was that, Ellie? Truth!
She burbled some, clearly amused by the big dumb WTF look on my face. Beyond that, she wasn't talking.
But I could tell she was in on it.
