Sometimes you just run into walls, at full speed. Sometimes you are aware of it before impact. This time was no exception.
As the Pennsylvania Turnpike snaked through snowy mountains and past twitchy state troopers, I could feel the gravity of the situation change, as if to indicate the oncoming disaster. I had to see my family again, and under the worst circumstances possible.
Now, for those that do not understand my family dynamic much, it goes something like this: I have a great relationship with my parents, but don’t see them too often. My other relatives I haven’t seen in at least 10 years, least of which is my sister whom I haven’t spoken to in six. My small extended family is geographically distant, and thus the few American relatives that I have I’ve never really gotten to know. No family reunions. No Christmas mornings together. These people, for all intents and purposes, are strangers to me.
As I checked into the Best Western on Sumneytown Pike, snow lazily drifting from the black sky above, my heart sank. The reality of the situation hit me square in the jaw as my cousin walked through the door. I have no sense of family.
One of my biggest dreams as a child was to grow up and have merry, joyful reunions with my sister’s future family, my parents gracefully slipping into their golden years, and my own eventual family as well. As a child, I saw it as a Norman Rockwell painting. Perfect. Static. An unchanging certainty. Well, needless to say, this did not happen and never will. My family has changed to the degree that we will most likely be as we are now: fragmented and disconnected. It doesn’t take a great leap in thought to realize what once was my most cherished dream is now one of my greatest fears. I have only my parents in this world now.
As they lowered my grandmother into the vault, to be buried next to her husband, daughter, parents and brother, I longed to know my roots. Tales of rolling Irish countrysides, towns filled with cousins, have always been told to me, but never really sunk in. But here, standing at Holy Seplechure Cemetary in Mt. Airy Pennsylvania, I believed it. Tracing the dates on the headstones with my eyes, I looked around at those holding flowers. I will probably only see these people one or two more times in my life. We truly are strangers, brought together by tragedy. We share pain, but not joy. What a sad family.
On Sunday morning, as the fiance and I headed back towards the midwest, I felt more alone than I ever have been in life. Seeing my mother bury her last living parent, watching my father display signs of age and weariness…the days where I will be in the same position are not far off. Never before had I felt it, the notion of having one foot in the grave. In Pennsylvania, I did.
The lack of emotional security of our American young people is due, I believe, to their isolation from the larger family unit. No two people - no mere father and mother - as I have often said, are enough to provide emotional security for a child. He needs to feel himself one in a world of kinfolk, persons of variety in age and temperament, and yet allied to himself by an indissoluble bond which he cannot break if he could, for nature has welded him into it before he was born. [Pearl S. Buck]
How terribly true.
