What Family Leaves Behind

The building looked abandoned.

The parking lot was empty.

Navigation said I was at the right place.

I was about to drive around the block to check if I somehow missed the place when I saw my cousin walking across the parking lot.

It was the right place.

The only way I recognized him was because of his long hair, everything else was changed. Time will certainly do that, but time combined with a specific life, and the emotional weight of that life made him unrecognizable.

It took him about twenty feet before his eyes widened and he realized who I was.

Time and emotional weight will do that also.

It took an earnest hug to confirm that he really was who he said he was.

I should go inside, he will be right in after a cigarette.

Which room was it?

Which hallway to walk down to a place where I didn’t want to be.

There were no voices to follow, no crying to hear, no people to even ask, just a formal sign, first and last name to direct me.

My last name.

Five people in the room, and that was including me since I crossed the threshold and could not back out now.

My cousin in a wheel chair, along with my last aunt, and another woman wrapped in a heavy scarf as if there was no heat in the room.

They were sorting through a box of pictures, all times that ended some years ago when we all no longer had Fourth of July, summer at the pool, and riding bikes by the creek.

This was the fist time I was seeing these pictures, yet I remembered each one, adding my own two to the pile.

Where were all the people?

My cousin had reached out through Facebook to call her, and even with that I never expected it.

Somehow my cousin had survived decades where everybody else only lasted a few years, and after a while he seemed immortal to all of it.

The memorial post online, all of the condolences, likes, hearts, and hugs.

Literally hundreds of them, all from friends.

Yet even an hour in is was just the five of us.

I should go up and say something even if he can’t hear me.

My cousin was changed by time and his lifestyle, yet out of all of us he looked the most recognizable even with the tattoos on his neck and hand.

The sad happy face tattoo and spider web tattoo were a part of him and that world he lived in.

I stayed to the end which is unlike me in these sort of things, thinking just how did we get here.

Where did all the aunts, uncles, parents, and grandparents go?

Now just three kids who are adults, the apparent matriarch of the family, and the woman in the scarf.

The service was the next morning and it was still just the five of us as words were said and music was played.

How do we really know where he is, and what he can see now?

How are we supposed to just believe that?

When the moment came to say something my body wanted to get up, but my heart held me down in place.

If he can see and hear us now, he would know if I got up and spoke I would be lying.

He would know that after the family barbecues, holidays, and summers fishing in the creek I would have nothing more to say.

That we grew up in the same family and circumstances, two fathers who were exactly the same, but something happened and my side of the family went in one direction, and his side of the family went in another direction.

That I was able to escape but he couldn’t.

That because of that escape I could not enter his world no matter what my heart and mind said.

At a certain point it wasn’t about me, but my wife and kids.

Cuz, how could I risk even bringing them into your world.

I had to keep it so you never knew they existed and I was always working and never around.

It wasn’t an easy decision, but once it was made the stakes were such I could never turn back.

Yet I know, that even last week If I called you after all those years, you would be on my doorstep in hours ready to do anything I asked.

We were family.

No, I publicly I had nothing to say, privately all I could ask was for understanding, not forgiveness.

When the peace arrived the woman with the scarf’s composure finally cracked and broke down.

I had never heard a person make that kind of noise and it was instinct to turn and offer her a hug as she threw herself at me and wrapped her arms around me.

A stranger.

In all my years of life I had never experienced a moment like that.

An intimacy of total surrender, total grief, and total love for another person.

Her person.

So much of it, I held on as long as I could as this was my last chance to be with my Cuz no matter where he was.