Cabin_ Two Brothers, a Dream, and Five Acres in Maine - Lou Ureneck [9]
“Babe is very sick,” she told him again.
“He is?” John replied.
“Yes. He has cancer.”
Tears filled his eyes each time he heard it again.
I returned to Boston, shaken. My mother was gone, Uncle Babe was dying and John was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. I brooded on the passage of time, the loss of family. The description is inadequate but I felt like I was standing in a house in which everything important to me—books, photos, cards given to me by my children—was being carried out by strangers. What soon would be left? How would I recognize my world and find my way without my mother and uncles? Only one of my uncles, Constantine, was both alive and healthy, and he was at the precipice of eighty. I had grown up with no family homestead that I could return to—no familiar porch, or view to the barn or the mountains, no place at the lake that was full of memories. Four years was the longest I had ever lived in one place as a boy, and that was in a home that we eventually lost in a foreclosure. I did not have a single possession from my childhood. These family relationships were all I had brought into my adulthood.
It is hard to account completely for the shadow that then fell over me, but fall it did, and it came down hard. Maybe it was more than the loss of family members—maybe it was the acknowledgment that I had passed my own personal equinox. I was coming to terms with being the generation within the family that stood between the children and death. I was not old, of course, but I had stepped forward in the inevitable succession of generations. When I was a boy, my grandmother represented the generation that occupied that final position, and it seemed then that it would always be so; for a very long time, my mother and uncles held it; now it was falling to me and Paul. I had survived—barely—the passing of my mother, because I had begun preparing myself for it as a nervous child, rehearsing the pain of her loss. With her gone, how would I survive without the web of family that my uncles represented? Or a worse thought: I knew I could not survive a world without Paul. He figured too importantly into my recollecting and possession of a past, and he was the one person I could rely on for coherence. We had shared a childhood, and the things that were important to me, the things I could not retrieve—my mother, father, stepfather, holidays, disappointments—belonged to Paul too. He was my link to my past, and that past was at the core of who I knew myself to be.
When I returned from New York, I thought of the hawk, contemplated the shadow that had fallen over me and brooded yet more on the past. Suddenly, memories of growing up took on a powerful and unhealthy importance to me. I felt like I needed to hold on to them to hold on to myself. I leaned against them the way a drunken man might lean against a wall. I recognized all of this as morbid thinking, and I knew myself well enough to realize that I was falling into a familiar abyss. It was as if the ground were giving out from under me. I smiled for my students and diligently put marks on their papers, but the shadow pursued me along the streets of Kenmore Square and in the corridors of the university building where I taught on Boston’s short winter days. Neither had the trouble in my new relationship gone away—no one’s fault, and not for lack of love, just the reality of two adults juggling far-flung jobs and responsibilities. I didn’t have my feet firmly under me.
I had waited out the darkness before. It took longer than a cloud—or a hawk—passing in front of the sun, but it was not dissimilar, and I knew it could be done. One of the benefits of getting older is that you recognize your antagonists and know how to defeat them, or at least give them the feint until they pass of their own accord. I got prescriptive with myself. There were things I could do that