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Aug. 17th, 2018 07:49 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretIn the past week, I've lost two great-uncles- both of my grandmother's brothers. (Or as my grandmother used to call them, My Brother and My Other Brother.) One of my great-aunts died a month ago, too. It's been a rough summer for the family. I don't really know what to do with the grief, it's been so mixed up with other emotions, and none of them were young, and none of this was truly unexpected.
They were both warm, kind people, but they were my family's version of the same, so they were also prickly and abrasive and of very fixed opinion. When I was a kid, I was so shy and socially awkward that whenever we had big family gatherings I'd bring a book and hide off in a corner reading. My great-uncles used to sneak up on me, steal the book, and force me to interact with other people. I guess I'm grateful now? I'm certainly grateful for the family stories I heard at those gatherings. My great-grandmother had an impossible number of sisters and all but two of them lived within a two block area of each other in Brooklyn when my grandmother and her brothers were growing up, so they all grew up in a tight mesh of cousins as their primary social circle. Family was important and central to them, and I think it was a largely happy childhood, though I've always had the impression that my grandmother would've been grateful for a little more privacy.
My older great-uncle was a high school baseball star, with one of those stories about how if only he hadn't torn something, he might've been a pro. Both of them were lifelong golfers, as a lower impact substitute.
At VVC, I was telling the only war story I ever heard from them. They were both serving in the European theater with different companies in the waning days of the war, and somehow they managed to arrange to have some leave at the same time and they hitchhiked across Europe to meet up. Everything about the story was unbelievable, and I wouldn't believe it because my family is full of pranksters, but there's a photo of the two of them in their uniforms, arms around each other.
I also remember the last time the three of them were all together. My grandmother had dementia and some of the time barely remembered who all of us were, but she was so delighted to have her brothers around, she knew exactly who they were... and the three of them spent the afternoon viciously mocking each other in Yiddish and English for eighty years worth of private reasons.
I just wish for better news, you know? Baruch Dayan Emet.
They were both warm, kind people, but they were my family's version of the same, so they were also prickly and abrasive and of very fixed opinion. When I was a kid, I was so shy and socially awkward that whenever we had big family gatherings I'd bring a book and hide off in a corner reading. My great-uncles used to sneak up on me, steal the book, and force me to interact with other people. I guess I'm grateful now? I'm certainly grateful for the family stories I heard at those gatherings. My great-grandmother had an impossible number of sisters and all but two of them lived within a two block area of each other in Brooklyn when my grandmother and her brothers were growing up, so they all grew up in a tight mesh of cousins as their primary social circle. Family was important and central to them, and I think it was a largely happy childhood, though I've always had the impression that my grandmother would've been grateful for a little more privacy.
My older great-uncle was a high school baseball star, with one of those stories about how if only he hadn't torn something, he might've been a pro. Both of them were lifelong golfers, as a lower impact substitute.
At VVC, I was telling the only war story I ever heard from them. They were both serving in the European theater with different companies in the waning days of the war, and somehow they managed to arrange to have some leave at the same time and they hitchhiked across Europe to meet up. Everything about the story was unbelievable, and I wouldn't believe it because my family is full of pranksters, but there's a photo of the two of them in their uniforms, arms around each other.
I also remember the last time the three of them were all together. My grandmother had dementia and some of the time barely remembered who all of us were, but she was so delighted to have her brothers around, she knew exactly who they were... and the three of them spent the afternoon viciously mocking each other in Yiddish and English for eighty years worth of private reasons.
I just wish for better news, you know? Baruch Dayan Emet.