Charles · 17 July 2002
Long ago my cousin, who lived up North, would be brought to visit; he was two years older than my brother, who was two years older than me. The three of us are lined up in home movies, standing there fidgeting – my cousin blond, my brother reddish-brown, me dark. When I try to assemble memories of him from those years, I can’t. All I get are movies.
My cousin died. Though I only just learned of it, he died seven months ago, on Christmas night. The facts are vague.
I saw him only once since childhood, in the mid-1990s, at the memorial service for his mother. It was an uncomfortable day, remembering my aunt; she was sweet and kind but poisoned with misery. Her marriage had been a disaster – as damaging as these things can be – and she had fled, winding up in San Diego, where she lived with a man who was just as sweet and kind but who, in the end, could not separate her from the habit that took her life.
At the memorial that day my cousin looked gaunt and disconnected, barely raising his eyes, and as uncomfortable as anyone so disconnected must be in the role of child of the deceased. I can’t recall ever seeing someone so visibly wanting to be invisible, so in need of escape, yet so hollowly aware that neither would happen.
His father was there, my onetime uncle, former husband to my father’s sister; a son of a bitch. While memories of my cousin are evasive, I have no trouble assembling a picture of my uncle: fierce, angry, abusive, the sort of person who, on a family trip to McDonald’s, could find cause to threaten violence on the manager. He ran a meat packing operation, visits to which remain in my mind as a wash of blood and bone and rage. He once told me of a fired employee: ‘Cocksucker was robbing me in rolls of quarters. Fucking quarters’. I was nine.
The years hadn’t calmed him. Amid the aching silences of the memorial, while his son stared at the ground and everyone else tried to figure out what to do, he complained and hurled insults at the man who had become my aunt’s companion, who had flown from California, for this.
It was there I learned my cousin, then in his mid-thirties, was living with his father, nearing seventy, on a boat.
Between then and now I know only this: that the boat sank some time ago, and that they had been living together somewhere even smaller, in circumstances that required they sleep in the same bed. My uncle still worked, somewhere, packing meat, and, when my father visited them now and again to make sure they were okay, my uncle would have none of it.
My cousin died in his sleep, on Christmas night.
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