My mother’s parents raised seven children. Six of the seven would have kids, 17 in all, which meant we never suffered for a lack of playmates. We all had at least one cousin who was our age or near it, and at one time or another, each one of them was a “favorite.”
We’d play in my grandparents’ yard underneath the giant cottonwood trees that long ago were cut down. We waged spectacular battles with the trees’ seed pods, with crab apples. We lay on our bellies near the tree roots, tickling tiny sand pits with blades of grass until an ant lion jumped, a hiccup of sand, which we seized in our fists and then sorted to marvel at an insect that looked prehistoric. We ran around in packs while Grandpa played guitar and our fathers and mothers sang and visited at the kitchen table.
Christmases, Easters, Thanksgivings, birthdays, we cousins spent nearly all of them together, and when we were older and no longer played with ant lions, we’d scoot out of the house before our mothers made us do the dishes and wander along the irrigation ditches, exploring abandoned houses, talking tougher than any of us really were. There are many pictures of us, skin dark from the sun, arms thrown around each other.
We finished school. Moved to different states. Had our own families. We became the cliche, together again only for funerals and weddings.
My cousin Suzanne pointed that out just a few days ago. The occasions for which we gather now are either sad or joyous, with little in between, but, she said, “we always have so much fun because we’re all together again.”
She said this during one of her lucid moments. From her hospital bed, just before she moved back to her mother and father’s house, where she has gone to die.
Cancer. It spread from her kidney to her lungs and brain. It is one of those situations in which the clues that something was wrong became clear only in hindsight. She went to the hospital a month ago. Her doctors told her she had six months, maybe a year with surgery. When surgery no longer became an option, the doctors told her there was nothing they could do but help her manage her pain.
They give her about three weeks to live. She is 47, mother to a daughter, grandmother to two young boys.
Funeral, weddings, births, such events have a way of rearranging the world. Death of a loved one, in particular, has a way of refocusing priorities, tuning out the noise. It does not last long, usually. We are forgetful, preoccupied creatures, easily distracted.
This is a family story, and there will be many among you who know it, who know what is lost and what is discovered or remembered, who know what it is to be bonded to others. My aunt strokes her daughter’s hair. She crawls into bed beside her, kissing her cheek, holding her as if she were still a baby and could be protected from harm by diligence, by love, by the shield of her embrace.
It is my cousin’s nature that when the doctors told her and her family she had a large mass on her brain, she interrupted them and their somber tones and said: “Large mass on my brain? Well, let’s get that S.O.B. out of there!”
Suzanne possesses a wide, mischievous grin, and it was on display at that moment, and when she asked one of her doctors to marry her, and when, shortly after admission into the hospital, she joined her two grandsons on the playground and rode tricycles with them.
“I have had,” she tells me, “a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, wonderful life.”
My cousin and her family need us, and we come. Cousins, nephews, nieces, aunts, uncles. We tell stories. We sit around her as she rests, and one auntie massages her hands and a cousin her feet, and she asks for Cream of Wheat and then jokes that the spoon had better be silver.
She laughs, and time accordions. All the years since we formed an air band that played the hell out of Hotel California disappear. All the years since the summer the two of us spent in Clovis with Grandpa and Grandma and were consumed by so many fits of the giggles that Grandma yelled at us. We sobered up and then looked at each other and dissolved into laughter again.
“How lucky I am,” Suzanne says. “Think of all the people who are alone.”
We, my siblings, my cousins, have always believed our childhoods among a loving, extended family to be a gift. We are fixed in a constellation.
Some of you know this story of family love. You know how much it matters. You may not have to be reminded of its blessings, of what is easy to take for granted. My cousin is not alone and never has been.
Tina Griego writes Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. Reach her at 303-954-1416 or tgriego@denverpost.com.
