people come, people go, alienation is forever

On a date in late August 1970, my mom married my stepfather on Mt. Mansfield in Vermont. The craggy rocks behind them were dotted with parti-colored hippies arrayed in floaty clothes that dragged on the stones like festive seaweed. My mother’s uncles and her parents were there, as were a bunch of my mom’s friends. None of my stepfather’s family were in attendance. Instead, he was surrounded by his band-mates, including the trumpeter who was an ordained minister and performed the ceremony in his bare feet. My step-dad was estranged from his family; his new marriage to my mother prompted him to repair the relationship.

I met my step-dad’s family the following Christmas, when he, my mom and I braved a snowstorm to drive from Vermont to Philadelphia. I had an ear infection, and upon stepping on my spanky, new grandparents’ welcome mat, I puked ebulliently. That was my new extended family’s introduction to me. As a beginning, it was less inauspicious than it might have been, but it did signal a certain uneasiness, at least on my part.

My stepfather’s family has very little in common with my mother’s, the only family I had known until the age of eight when I puked on that doorstep. My mother comes from a long line of dour, pessimistic people, and while my stepfather’s can be categorized as only marginally more optimistic, they are different—voluble where my mother’s family is tight-lipped; given to spontaneous acts of affection, where my mom’s family hug like they might catch something; and generous, where my mother’s is prudent. Most emblematically, if reductively, my mother’s family is Unitarian, while my stepfather’s family is Jewish, and though my step-dad’s parents celebrated Christmas (there had been a remarriage in that family too, as well as an attendant shifting in custom), these Christmases stood in bright, shiny, opulent, noisy and fun contrast to my traditional modest affairs that played out to the subdued strains of Handel’s Messiah.

I felt alienated from my brand new extended family, but then I felt alienated from everyone. By eight, I realized I would never fit in, though I still had about three decades to live before I accepted it. And yet, similarly to the ways I felt about my original family, there were some members I liked, some of which I were quite fond, some I loved, and some I was terrified by.

There were also others who fascinated me. My Uncle Aaron was one of these. Aaron had this rat pack, ring-a-ding-ding aura about him. He spent the ‘70s wearing a lot of Orlon shirts in complementary tones of swirly, paisley or marled colors—blue and beige, coral and red, maroon and brown; his wife, Ava, who is my stepfather’s sister, often matched him. Aaron and Ava were two of the best coiffed people I had ever met. Their hair always was perfect. Their clothes always were perfect. Ava’s make-up included a complex blending of several shades of eyeshadow that she mixed with an oil painter’s precision, and it was always perfect. They always smelled perfect too, some elixir of perfume, mouthwash, antiperspirant, and styling products.

Ava and Aaron were one of those couples who move together with the unthinking grace of synchronized swimmers. In their speech, the pronoun “we” worked with a seamless logic, even if they were expressing their own individuality. Ava loved to read, which she did ardently. Aaron loved to play poker, which he did well and judiciously. Neither of them wanted children. Neither of them liked the country. They both enjoyed easily recognizable food. Both of them smoked prodigiously, and when I watched them smoking, I saw that both of them enjoyed it, immensely.

Yesterday, my Uncle Aaron died after a protracted battle with lung cancer. He was in his mid-sixties. He had been diagnosed a handful of years ago, and when the cancer progressed, he had a lung removed. Then the cancer hit his bones, and within a few months, he had dwindled to just over a hundred lbs. He was over 6’ tall. He died in his and Ava’s condominium, my Aunt Ava watching him, her sister at her side. I feel for Ava and for all of those people who actually knew Aaron, loved him, and felt close to him. My own sense of loss feels so abstract that it washes to a pale coloring-book facsimile of the intense grief Ava and others feel.

Tomorrow I go to Aaron’s funeral, and I’ll see my stepfather’s family, most of whom I’ve not seen in over twenty years. It will, undoubtedly, be strange. But then it always was strange, though no stranger than being with my own family. To intensify the strange, the last time I saw all of them was at my grandfather’s funeral. My stepfather was understandably grief-stricken. I remember his close-mouthed fury at his stepmother’s choices that flew in the face of Jewish tradition: an open casket, a four-day lag time before burial, no one sitting shiva. At his father’s grave, after my grandfather’s body had been antiseptically lowered into the ground, my stepfather angrily clawed a handful of dirt from the frozen ground and threw it, his eyes stony as a basilisk’s, onto the coffin.

Life has a way of being messy, and nothing brings that mess into high relief like a death, even a death of a person to whom you’re not particularly close. Tomorrow, I see my parents from whom I’m moderately estranged. I’ve spoken to them about five times in the past seven months. I see this group of extended people who last saw me when Reagan was president. All that time passing, all those years, and all that change, and still I wonder if I will always feel betwixt and between, separate from my family, different and alien, and ever slightly uneasy, no matter the quality of affection, or the bloodiness of our bonds.

Comments

[Pete]

CG,
There is no Ozzie and Harriet or Cleaver family in reality, all are dysfunctional in some way.
Pete

[MJ]

Excellent piece. Good day for it too, as I'm working through my feelings on my family after a bizarro-world phone call with my mother. Who ARE these people we ended up with in family units? How can they change so much (how did mom become a Rush follower and a bigot so quickly?)? How do we handle some kind of love, or something, for them coupled with profound alienation from them and abhorrance of some of the things they embrace? Yep, we're all dysfunctional. I guess that is one of those other shitty parts of being human.

[1st Republic 14th Star]

Pete's right. All families are dysfunctional in one way or another. I've had occasions to tell people "don't play 'who had a worse childhood' with me. You. Will. Lose.'"

I've also told relatives of mine who are estranged from each other that it's worth working things out. You ought to be able to count on your family even when no one else has a reason to stand by you.

Sorry for your loss. Hope things look up soon.