Cousins

When I was a very young child, my family would have huge family gatherings.  There were people & children everywhere.  There were piles of gifts and the scent of Christmas dinner filling the entire house.  Maybe it was simply childhood memories, exagerated.  Maybe it just seemed like there were more people than there actually was. 

My grandmother died and the huge, or seemingly huge gatherings were no more.  My parents and my sister had Christmas and Thanksgiving in our home.  Just the four of us.  My mother and her brother had a falling out that lasting for many years.

I watch movies and television shows where people have brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles and oodles of cousins.  The main characters hang out with their siblings and cousins like they are friends.  I become jealous of this.  I want it all back.  I want to relive the massive Easters where we'd hunt all over a massive backyard of a farm for chocoaltes, candy, and if you were really lucky, a dollar.

I want what these people on TV have. 

When my uncle developed skin cancer, it was bitter sweet.  He and mom reconciled.  After a double surgery, his long, coarse hair had become matted after not having been brushed or washed for a week.  I brushed it, careful as I was, for an hour.  It was quite comical, actually.  He yelped out loudly in a quite hospital as I worked through the mangled mess and laughed.  He laughed because I was laughing.  We talked about movies, old times, my cousins.

And I thought maybe I was getting a tiny part of all that back.  I thought maybe my uncle would recover, that I myself would reconcile with my cousins and reconnect with my uncle.  It was never meant to be.  My uncle told me tales of booze and drugs concerning certain ones, and he himself would soon to succumb to the cancer.  He will presently soon be discussing the results of a PET scan with a neurologist, or a neurosurgeon--he can never keep it straight.

When I was a child I so looked forward to visits with my uncle and my cousins.  It was ripped from me in the form of bitterness a strong will to never forgive or forget.  I regained a teeny tiny piece of those memories reformed into adulthood and were once again stolen by the C Word.  I have not seen my uncle in many months.  The last I saw of my cousins was when he had his surgery a couple years ago.

How I long for those days of my youth.  Even when the eldest cousin was mean to me, I long for those days.  I miss them.  I miss my family.  What they show on TV is not real, I am aware of that.  My cousins are many, many miles away busy with their own families and jobs and lives. 

I am busy here myself with own life and my two shots of whiskey, which have gone striaght to my head, by the way.  And I am still quite jealous of those of TV.