Thanks to Facebook Brent has recently gotten back in touch with his cousin Kim. It's been really fun to watch him interact with her. Family is a really different thing for him to get used to. I have an excess of it. He has always had very little. His dad had two brothers and they each had two kids but once Jack and Ann left Michigan they really haven't kept in touch. Jack's parents are both dead and Ann's father is as well. Brent's grandmother on Ann's side is still alive but we don't have much contact with her. Basically up until a month ago if you were to ask Brent about family he would probably have mentioned Christopher and I and his mother and that was it.
Kim and Brent have been catching up and visiting and commenting on each other's posts and doing all of the things family does. Shared family and shared experiences are a cool thing. Even if it was years ago.
Kim sent a package to Brent this week of photos and mementos his grandmother had kept. His dad's 7th grade yearbook, a bible that belonged to his dad and pictures. Pictures of Brent's great grandparents. Pictures of Brent's grandparents. Pictures of cousins and aunts and uncles. It was nice to look through them. When Christopher was born I put together two photo albums for him. One called Mom's Side and one called Dad's Side. There weren't a lot of pictures from Jack's side of the family so this is a great find for me to add to Christopher's books.
When the package got here we looked through everything. Then looked through it again. Who is this? When was this? Oh my gosh look at this! I knew Jack was raised in a household similar to mine as far as religion goes, but to see he also went to a private Christian school was interesting. To read the dedication in the bible he received from his folks made me smile. He would have been about the same age I was when I got my own. And to know that he had come to the same conclusions about religion as I had later in life gave me another touch stone with my father-in-law that helps explain why we got along as well as we did.
There was also a picture that made both Brent and I laugh. It was a picture of Jack that had obviously been cut out from a bigger picture. Kim's note said that there had been "Someone" else in the picture but she cut them out. Brent and I had to laugh because the "Someone" else had to have been Jack's second wife. Jack and Ann married very young and had Brent within two years of marriage. Jack went to Vietnam and Brent was born while he was there. When he got back he was transferred to Germany, Ann said she wasn't going and they ended up splitting. While they were divorced they each married other people. When Jack was transferred back to the States his second wife said she wasn't going, so they split as well. Years passed and eventually Jack and Ann remarried. This is just family history. But it made us laugh that Kim would go to the trouble to cut Pat (we think that was her name) out of the shot just in case it would upset Brent to see his dad with his other wife. Kim is good people, as my father would say.
Now the part that amazed me the most was the miracle of time. When you lose someone you get all of the condolences and the sayings of comfort. The main one you hear over and over is "it just takes time". This week was a strong lesson on the healing power of time. That package? With pictures of Jack, and Jack's things? You know the day it arrived? September 2. The anniversary of Jack's death. Two years ago Brent's father died. It ripped a hole in all of our lives that at the time felt like it would never heal. Last year on the anniversary of his death I cried most of the day. We called his mother and cried with her. This year we talked about if we should call or not and decided that it was macabre to mark the time every year and so we would choose to not. But that package came anyway. Kim didn't plan the day of its arrival, just one of those quirky things that happen. And we looked through everything, and talked about the pictures and family and laughed at the cut out. And didn't shed a single tear.
Time heals. It really does.
No comments:
Post a Comment