2001-07-28 - 11:08 p.m.

Death claims another

This has definitely not been a good couple of months for my shrinking family.

I just got a phone call from one of my cousins. My father's sister, his mother, is dead. I last spoke of her here. What I didn't mention before is that my sister Janis is her namesake, so I will be calling her Aunt Janis.

Aunt Janis was the youngest of my father's siblings. With her death that entire generation of the family is extinguished.

The cousin who called me is named Dirck, after a Dutch ancestor of ours. I've always liked Dirck the best of my cousins, and after he gave me the news he and I talked for the better part of two hours. Actually, that's not quite accurate. HE talked, I listened. Like my late uncle Frank and my sister Janis, Dirck is a chatterbox.

Also, like my sister Janis, he's something of a square peg. While his four siblings (three brothers and a sister) are all employed in various high paying white collar jobs, Dirck runs a snowplow in the Winter and works as a landscaper during the Spring, Summer and Fall.

When Dirck was a teenager nobody could have predicted that he'd become a manual laborer. He was very smart and bookish with an almost genius-like intensity. I would have thought he'd be a scientist or something, but he seems happy as a clam doing what he's doing, marching to a different drummer from his rather uptight family.

And Dirck is like Janis and Uncle Frank in another way - he's gay.

He's been living with Dan, his significant other (there has GOT to be a better name for a gay life partner than that) for at least fifteen years, maybe longer. He told me, with some pride, that he and Dan were the longest-lasting relationship in his family. That's true - I remember him introducing me to Dan at one of his brothers' weddings in the early 1980s.

As stuffy as I feel his family is, they made a really nice gesture toward Dan. When Aunt Janis knew that her illness was truly terminal, she started donating money to her children and their spouses, and Dan got one of the "spouse" checks.

You can contrast this to my mother, who put a clause in her will that Janis' share of her estate would be held in trust until she got married and had a child.

Anyway, Dirck didn't sound the least bit upset as he talked about Aunt Janis' last illness.

Basically, she lost a battle with cancer than she had been fighting on and off for over ten years. She's had two bouts with breast cancer, and had lost one breast, then the other. After the second mastectomy she had some chemotherapy, that somehow was involved with her getting bone cancer, which is what eventually killed her.

In 1996 she'd had a lot of joint pain, and she'd assumed that her arthritis was getting worse. After the doctors ran a bunch of tests she was diagnosed with bone cancer and given six months to live. However, according to Dirck, Aunt Janis had seemed her usual busy self up until a month before she went in the hospital for the last time. This was five years after she'd been given six months to live.

So my aunt was a fighter, and that's something I admire. However, the plain fact is that we are not a close family and here's the proof - Aunt Janis died on July 15, and I just found out about it tonight. It was nice that Dirck remembered to tell me - but it was plain that nobody else cared enough to remember our branch of the family.

Tomorrow I'll hunt down a sympathy card to send the family. Although, now that I think about it, none of them sent any of us any sympathy cards. Well, actually I haven't gotten any sympathy cards from ANYONE. Gee, if I was a person who cared a lot about such things I'd be kind of hurt.

Sometimes I feel like I'm almost normal, and then something reminds me of the little gaps in my humanity. I just don't understand how families and relatives are supposed to work. Whenever I have to deal with stuff like that, I always feel that I am faking it.

Actually, now that I think about it I did get a rather nice letter from Aunt Janis after Dad died. I was rather tardy with my reply so I don't know if she read it before she went into the hospital.

When I was a kid, from time to time, my parents would take me down to visit Aunt Janis and her family - this was when she and her husband were still married. They had a big colonial house in a wealthy rural suburb north of New York City and a beach house on Long Island. The thought didn't occur to me then, but they had a lot more money than we did.

My Aunt Janis had the most horrible nickname ever. Because she was pudgy as a child, she was called "Tubby" and the nickname stayed with her throughout her life even thought she lost the weight by the time she was a young woman. When my parents were planning to visit them, they called it "going down to Tub and Dick's."

Well, the 40s were an era of awful nicknames. My mom's nickname was "Miffins."

I am sad that Aunt Janis is gone, and I'm sorry I didn't get to know her better. Perhaps these are my insecurities talking, but I don't think she liked me much.

The last time I saw her in person was back in 1998. I had put Dad in an adult home and was getting ready to sell the house, and that meant selling the furnishings. My parents had a lot of antique furniture, but I didn't have much appreciation for such items. They really wouldn't have gone well in my apartment. Some of them were quite ugly, and my parents hadn't taken care of any of them. They were dirty, they needed refinishing, pets had peed on them, etc. I'd made a deal with an antique buyer and appraiser to sell them, when Aunt Janis called inquiring about the stuff. She said that she wanted some of it.

This upset the antique buyer terribly, but I had him give me prices for the individual items so Aunt Janis could pick and choose. He felt he had done a lot of work, and it wasn't fair that the items he had buyers for were going to be snatched from under his nose. I told him I would try to limit the stuff that Aunt Janis took.

She showed up with her youngest son, Tim, in tow. He lived in San Francisco, and I'd been to his wedding some twelve years before. He was only a few years older than me, but he kept calling me by the diminutive of my given name, something I've never liked.

He and Aunt Janis picked out a lot of furniture, in fact most of the best items. They seem kind of surprised when I quoted them a price on the things they wanted. Did they expect me to just GIVE these expensive items to them?

They hemmed and hawed a bit, then they reduced the number of things they wanted. Finally they decided they didn't want any of it.

At first I felt badly that I was depriving them of some family treasures, but as they were looking at the furniture it quickly became apparent that Tim was some sort of antique dealer himself, and was sizing up the items for resale. The main reason he passed on the stuff was that he had no place to store it on the East Coast and no cheap way to get it back to the West Coast.

Now that I think about it, they probably had much nicer stuff in their own homes, why would they want to further clutter their houses with our shabby, ill-used junk?

The whole experience seemed to leave a bad taste in everyone's mouth. They probably thought I was a mercenary underclass rube, but like I told them, I couldn't afford to give the stuff away because Dad was broke and needed the money. As it turned out the money we got from the antiques was vital because the family house took so long to sell, but that's another story.

As they left they casually mentioned that I might be welcome down at their house for Thanksgiving. I thought that it might be nice to see all the cousins and their big rambling colonial house in the country, when Tim suggested that I should bring Dad too. Ick. That turned the prospect of a pleasant weekend visit into an embarrassing babysitting chore.

However, November came and went that year without me hearing from them again. Their invitation seemed rather casual, and I felt it would be kind of forward to call them up and say "When should I come down?"

And the fact is I thought the invitation was merely a social nicety, and they really had no intention of actually having me down for Thanksgiving. It was just something nice to say.

In the next couple of days I'm going to send off a sympathy card to the family... and I may never hear from any of them again, with the exception of Dirck. I feel sad about that, but I don't think I can do anything about it now.

Up in the attic of the Hamster Palace I have a big box of family photographs. A lot of them go back into the 50s and the 40s, before I was born. There were many pictures of smart looking young people out on the town, boys in suits and ties, or even tuxedos, and girls in evening gowns. Among the revelers I can occasionally pick out familiar faces: my Dad, or my Uncle Frank, or my Aunt Janis. These people are all dead now, and whatever living link I had to those times is now gone.

I remember looking at the pictures of Aunt Janis when she was young, thinking what a handsome woman she was. She was very pretty, too pretty, in fact, to be bothered by an incongruous nickname like "Tubby."