Family dynamics

This post is going to be a bit rambly, I haven’t quite sorted out my thoughts yet, so bear with me.

My Uncle Jim died a couple of months ago. It wasn’t a surprise, he had been ill for a while and had some months earlier opted to quit his treatments, so when the day came I was not thrown for any loops, really.

This past weekend I joined my dad and Marty in going down to central Oregon, where Jim had lived and where his widow, my Aunt Marion, still does, for a sort of family get-together/mini-memorial for Jim. I had not been aware of his actual memorial service until after the fact, so I was glad to attend this whatever it was going to be even though I really had no idea what to expect.

Aside from Marion, I knew no one there; even my two cousins I had not seen in maybe 35 or 40 years, so though I had technically met them they were basically unknowns as well. So when we arrived and joined the group for dinner it was a little awkward. (Well, not for Marty, he’s a social butterfly, but for me and, to a lesser degree, I think, Dad.) Turns out all these other people were from Marion’s side of the family and that crowd had been getting together every couple of years or so for I don’t know how long.

The fact that this group of 20 or so folks—Marion is one of, I think, seven kids, so add spouses and children and whatnot and you get a large number pretty quick—had been a close-knit extended family struck me a bit in its contrast to my upbringing.

Extended family for me, when I was growing up, was very much an ancillary thing. There was some, those folks existed—a couple of them had weird designations like “uncle-cousin,” but that’s another story—and occasionally I would see some of them. But really, aside from my grandparents they were just relatives rather than family to us. (Well, to me, anyway; I shouldn’t speak for my sister, her mileage may vary.)

And there weren’t that many, really. My mom had had a brother, but he died in the mid-’70s at a rather young age and I never had much of a chance to know him (all I really remember about him that isn’t something told to me by others is that he also liked to watch Star Trek, so I liked him). My dad’s two brothers we would see once in a blue moon. I remember Jim and Marion visiting one Christmas when I was in single digits, and I recall maybe two visits to see them in Oregon. Visits with my Uncle Bob I recall even less; there was one trip after Christmas when I was 18, but I don’t recall any others even though there must have been at least one. Bob’s two kids were reasonably close in age to my sister and me, Jim’s two were younger. (Later on my mom remarried and we added some step-relatives, but they were strewn all over the globe and when we saw them it was a different sort of thing, usually involving a lot of conversation in a language I don’t speak.)

But the point is we didn’t see them much. We weren’t close by any stretch, partly because for each of them there were, let’s call them issues.

Bob and his wife were/are über-conservative Republicans who got their view of the world from Rush Limbaugh and Fox “News.” As I recall, they didn’t make a big stink about that when we’d get together, but it did pervade the atmosphere, if you will (I don’t know if they’re full-on MAGA cultists now or not, but it wouldn’t surprise me). With Jim and Marion it wasn’t politics so much as religion. They were devout churchgoers under some Christian denomination or other (I want to say Baptist, but that could be wrong) whereas I was raised with no religiousity whatsoever. The doctrine could feel a bit oppressive even though, as I would later think about it, they weren’t ever overtly evangelical with us or anything like that. It was enough, though, that they both were different and, in those particular ways, unappealing due to intolerant values from either the GOP or the church, and I tended to think of Bob and Jim not as individuals but simply as “Dad’s conservative brothers.”

It got more complicated after I moved out on my own, because a couple years after that my dad came out of the closet. Neither of his brothers took that very well given the aforementioned issues and thus my attitude toward them became even less charitable.

Around that time, maybe a year or two later, I came home from work and found a message from Uncle Jim on my answering machine (kids, ask your parents). He had come through town and looked me up, though he wasn’t sure if he had the right number; I guess there was more than one TC Harrison in the phone book. It was a friendly message, a nice attempt to get together for a meal or something, but in my mind, he had been a jerk to my dad and thus I didn’t want to talk to him, so I ignored it.

In the ensuing years, Jim had come around regarding my dad’s gayness and they mended fences; he and Marion would often visit Dad and Marty and occasionally we would cross paths when I would also be down to visit. It really wasn’t until around then that I recognized, with the distance of independence and some measure of maturity, that the grouping together of “Dad’s brothers” wasn’t a fair label—the two of them were very different people and deserved to be considered individually. As I thought about it, I recalled that every one of my interactions with my Uncle Jim as a kid were positive ones, from his showing me how his model trains worked to his generosity in picking up stuff like an old “Mr. Spock’s Music From Outer Space” record in his travels and sending it to me just because he knew I was a giant Star Trek nerd.

I still had to reckon with my biases regarding religion—I tended to (and, if I’m being honest with myself, still do to a fair degree) gravitate toward the sentiment articulated in the Mahatma Gandhi quote, “I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians”—but I did adjust my perspective, to be sure, and I definitely answered the phone if Jim called while passing through town again.

Even more recently, after Jim’s cancer had started its lethal invasion and he was approaching the end, my dad shared with me some things that Jim had written. He and Marion were both schoolteachers, and even though his focus was on the mathematical side of things he still had an educator’s facility with language and wrote very well. One of the pieces I read was a long essay about his personal evolution—his changing values, his attraction to and then subsequent alienation from his church, his concerns about how that evolution would affect his relationship with his daughters (who had been raised under those heavy doctrines), his wrestling with having a homo brother and how that related to the rest of it, things like that.

It was a moving piece, really, and made me realize that, unlike my Uncle Bob, my Uncle Jim and I were really a lot alike. Not in a shared interests kind of way—Jim was into cars and motorcycles, math and model trains, music and instruments; my nerdiness was always inclined to science-fiction and Star Trek, comics and cartooning, baseball and politics—but in terms of personalities. We were both introspective, process-oriented thinkers; idealist romantics; and, I’d like to think, of generous temperament.

So I wanted to be at this thing over the weekend. Maybe learn a little more about my uncle and see his daughters and whoever else might be there.

At the memorial portion of the weekend, my cousins read a little from a different selection of Jim’s writings that had similar themes to what I had read. They had photos from different points in Jim’s life displayed all around the room. And several of these other people, the strangers form Marion’s family, had splendid things to say in my uncle’s memory. It all has me thinking, not in a really profound way, but in a general sense, that I missed out by not spending time with him when I had opportunities to before. Uncle Jim was a pretty good dude.

The remainder of the weekend was just socializing, really; I chatted with a couple of my cousins’ kids and one of my cousins herself (the other was pretty busy organizing everything, so I didn’t talk much with her), made small talk with some of the others, ate a lot of salad (I wasn’t the only vegetarian in attendance, but I might as well have been). On Sunday a few of us went to the Class-A Eugene Emeralds baseball game, where I discovered just how devoted my cousin’s youngest daughter is to the Tri-City Dust Devils of the Northwest League (who were not playing in this game), which is fantastic—even Class-A players need fans, right?—and shortly afterwards I packed Dad, Marty, and our stuff back into my car and headed up I-5 for home.

It was an interesting few days. Nice to have a connection to my cousins as middle-aged adults rather than pre-teen children. Interesting to see an extended family unit that seems to function better than most. And nice to learn a little more about my late uncle.

And now, back to the world. Such as it is.