So who was he to you?

We’re sitting in Detroit, New York, DC, Philly, across Georgia, Ohio, everywhere. We’ve woken early to a missed call from the wee hours of the morning. We’re girding ourselves against the news. We’re calling back, spines stiff and cutting to the chase: “Who died?” We are absorbing the news, changing diapers, making breakfast, dusting forgotten shelves. The key for us is to keep moving. Keep moving and stay on the phone. We’re drinking coffee, we’re shredding junk mail, and we’re calling each other, over and over again. We’ve put on the music of our respective youths. In Georgia, you can hear the Dells. In DC, it’s Boyz II Men. Music, and ringtones. We have to keep calling each other. We have to tell each other stories. We have to wonder about funeral arrangements. We have to bicker and snap at each other, get briefly frustrated, hang up, and call back in a few hours. We have to guess how other family members are dealing. We have to call them after we decide how they feel… They don’t get the opportunity to disabuse us of our perceptions. We don’t actually say much, or we say everything. The silence and the noise, it’s all the same. It’s family. It’s the women of my family building a weathered, heavy chain against the grief. We don’t cry. Much. Not as long as we keep moving.

My cousin says, “All my life we’ve been searching for him.” I agree. Some years, we heard from him every week. Some years we didn’t even have a phone number for him. He was complicated. We are all complicated. My husband says, “Who is he exactly?” He cannot wrap his brain around my huge, huge, family. I say, “One of my grandmother’s brothers.” My grandmother had 10 siblings. His parents are close to my grandmother’s age. His grandparents passed years ago. He didn’t know their siblings, and they didn’t have all that many anyway. I say, “My uncle.” He stops himself from correcting me. He’s finally realized that in a family our size, we tend to simplify. Everyone older is an uncle or aunt. Everyone your age is a cousin. Even if they’re not. Everyone is family. Even if you don’t know how. My husband doesn’t know who this uncle is to me. He can’t recall if I’ve ever mentioned him. I don’t talk about my childhood much. It’s loaded for me, and I try not to dwell on things I can’t change. And there are so many aunts and uncles, so many cousins. I tell stories right before I take him to see someone. I tell stories right after someone dies.

He was a nice, nice man. One of my mother’s favorite uncles. I can tell, because he is complicated. I have inherited her love of complicated people. It is a narrow sliver of a counterculture streak, I suppose. For us, not so much. It’s never a radical act to love your family. He lived in Chicago, which was very cool. Detroit with a better reputation. We could trade barbs about our basketball teams. I grew up with the Bad Boys. He tolerated my armchair enthusiasm. He was a former athlete with a different perspective. I was a kid with a loud mouth.

He grew up in Detroit too. A very different Detroit from my own. It didn’t matter, much. Just as we are all family, our family is all Detroit. Very few of us move away. To my young brain, this made him an exception.

He would talk honestly about anything in his life. I didn’t get sent to the backyard to play in Chicago. I got a seat at the table, and he talked to me like an adult. I didn’t understand all of it. I don’t remember all of it. I know he wanted to help me avoid his mistakes. And I know his mistakes looked a lot like my father’s.

The dead father thing hangs between me and my family. Lots of silence, lots of assumptions about my feelings. We don’t talk about the thing. It’s a big reason I ran east after college. It’s a big reason I ran inside myself before I could leave for college. I want to wear it a certain way. In the Midwest I don’t get to do that, so I don’t stay for very long.

That’s not the fairest of assessments, but that is how it feels and therefore I don’t care.

My uncle didn’t care about how I wore it, or how I was supposed to be seen. (I didn’t even have words for that at the time.) He would just talk to me about the choices he made, especially the choices that overlapped with my father’s. He’d be very, very honest. He had some regrets. Most of the time, he was perfectly capable of surviving himself. My father did not survive himself. As a kid, I needed that juxtaposition. Needed to know that dad’s way wasn’t the only way. I needed to believe that with strength you can rise above. My uncle gave me that.

I haven’t seen him in years. An invitation to my wedding was returned by the post office. I would occasionally wonder about him, and about his kids. I assumed I’d hear from him, or about him. So many aunts and uncles, so many cousins. I didn’t hear anything until Saturday.

Eventually I have to stop calling and I have to stop answering the phone. I have to stare into space and hold my dog and sit still. It’s important to practice sitting still without crying. There’s an art to it. Someone will need me soon, or I will need someone else. This will all go better if we keep the emotional dreck at bay. We’re not an emotionally expressive group, as a whole. We don’t carry tissues. We carry bricks and build walls. We yo-yo each other, pushing away and then holding close. Fortifying ourselves with and against each other all at once. My husband looks at all of this and sees a lot of crazy. I look at my half-cleaned half-arranged house, I hear my music, I see myself clutching my phone, and I see my great-grandmother in her kitchen. I see my grandmother on her couch the day my father died. I see my mother in Georgia listening to the Dells. I see all their sisters and daughters too.

At my wedding, a woman is making a brief speech about marriage. She is poised and funny and full of life. My husband leans over and says, “Who is she?” I say, “She’s an auntie, related to my grandfather.” He says, “What’s her name?” I don’t know it. “How do you know she’s related to your grandfather?” he says. It’s the nose. And the charm.

With grandma’s family, it’s the stiff spine. It’s the refusal to limit mothering to your own children (or children at all). It’s the busy hands in times of tragedy. It’s the chip dip and peach cobbler and whisper fights. It’s a huge damn porch on Beniteau. It’s the tears that come eventually.

No matter how far away, it’s still family.