It was Mom & Dad’s 50th, back in NC, and I had a nice bouquet lined up to arrive as a commemorative from M. and I in our absence, necessitated by 12,000 miles between us and them, when the first email arrived and announced a devastating death in the family, Dad’s cousin Eileen. I called as soon as the sun was aligned properly for all of us to be up, but missed them. Then I went in to check email, as I do each morning, only to discover that on the same day, Dad’s brother had also died.

Eileen was definitional to me of my father’s generation. Dad himself, you’d say, would be, but he’s too close to see with that kind of perspective. Eileen, on the other hand, was an imposing, iconic figure, even while she was also immensely fun: witty, urbane, dismissive and sharply deflating of pomposity, I developed an association with her of cocktails and elegance and style. Her presence was always an occasion and made any occasion an event. Younger Brother, T., credits the food she served at her holiday parties with an early interest in cooking and why he became a chef. The Counsellor was always close to Eileen’s daughter, R., and that would be in no small part due to the fact that her character was so deeply reflective of her mother’s. Most of all, I recognize that Dad’s lost a person who was for him a foil, much as he was for her, the two of them brightening the other whenever they were together.

Hardest of all for Dad, of course, is losing his little brother, Roy. I suppose my memories of Roy are always going to be colored by those early encounters. I’ve never forgotten how he’d play with us, engaging us on a level that most adults wouldn’t have been bothered stooping to, but always interested, always a figure of humor and kindness. He was an entertainer, someone to be relied upon for music, even if his greatest accomplishment in that regard was the ukulele. In later years we didn’t see as much of him or our cousins, even though they lived not very far, but separate families grow their own ways and often grow apart, regardless of proximity. It was a source of frustration for Dad and for us all that Roy so limited contact between them, but none of us ever doubted they loved each other.

Strange they should go on the same day, and hard to bear. It alters the family landscape more than I can express, although it’s changed so much in the last five years or so I’d hardly managed even to take in those alterations. When Mom’s brother, John, died, that was a blow, but one we’d been prepared for, as he’d kept us involved with his terminal illness throughout the course of treatment. When Roy’s middle daughter, Jane, died, we only learned of it afterwards, and to be honest I still haven’t fully learned to exclude her from my familial reckonings. I suppose it’ll be much the same now with Eileen and Roy, so much a part of so much of my life that I cannot do anything but to have them with me always.