Kirkepiscatoid

This time of year, there's always a point I think about R.

R. was born in May 1949. He was my mother's half-brother, born to her mom and her stepdad, my grandpa. I was born in March 1960. R. got killed in a hunting accident in Nov. 1960, at age 11, about a week before Thanksgiving. He went squirrel hunting with an older boy, Ro., who was like 15-16 at the time, and R. got his .22 rifle hung in the brush while crossing a fence. He made the mistake of not handing the gun over to Ro. when crossing the fence. Somehow as he was pulling it out of the brush by the barrel, it moved the safety to “off” and then the trigger got hung in the brush and it went off, going through his temple.

Of course, back then, no one thought anything about a 15 or 16 year old taking an 11 year old squirrel hunting, and no one ever had to take a gun safety class. But Ro. ran back to the house to get my grandpa and R. was unconscious and they carried him back to the house. Of course, there were no real ambulances in Macon back then, the “ambulance” was the hearse from the local funeral home, and it was just “scoop and run” with no treatment on the way. They took him straight to MU Hospital in Columbia, and took him to surgery to open a window on his skull b/c his brain was swelling. But back then, there was not much you could do about an injury like that. He died the next day.

So the very first Christmas of my life was in a house with a huge pall over it. I obviously don’t remember any of this, but in my mind’s eye, I had to have perceived something that stuck with me the rest of my life.

What I do remember, though, about subsequent Christmases is that R. was always “there” somehow. For that matter, R. was “there” all the time, just more at the holidays. I remember there was a box of toys in the basement that I was never allowed to play with, or, for that matter, even look at. I remember when I did something different or funny, or new, that it was never original—it somehow reminded my grandparents or my mom of R. There was an ornament on my grandmother’s tree that was R.’s, something he made at school one year, and I knew not to mess with “R.’s ornament”. So even the Christmas tree had a ghost hanging on it.

There was a LOT of guilt about R. My grandmother blamed herself b/c she had bought the box of .22 cartridges that killed him. My grandfather blamed himself b/c he did not have time to take him hunting. My mom blamed herself b/c earlier in the day he had wanted to go to the movies with her and she blew him off and told him she didn’t want to go see a Saturday kid movie, she wanted to see a different movie. My great-grandfather blamed himself b/c he had loosened the safety on that rifle b/c his small thumb could not move it well. Lots and lots of blame. No one blamed each other, they all blamed themselves.

My grandpa took it the hardest, because R. was his only child; my mom was his stepchild. He went to the cemetery every week until the day he died. Some of my earliest conscious memories are that I realized I was both a blessing and a complication in my family’s lives. When I was a young adult, my grandpa told me once, “I don’t know what I would have done if you were not around. I think I would have killed myself if not for the fact you were in my life, and I had to be there for you.” But I was a complication in that it made my grandparents want to “parent” me, and they and my folks would frequently go at each other where how I should be handled was the object of discussion.

When I was born, my grandmother was not quite 43 and my grandfather was 35! He wouldn’t turn 36 until December! So it really was like having "two sets of parents." But everyone was just too young in this scenario.

There was also a little bit of the attitude of “St. R.” around the house. R. would have eaten his vegetables, that kind of stuff. He was always "there" somehow. I was not jealous of him, but I did wonder why I had to have someone around all the time I did not know.

It put strange ideas and fears in my head even as a very small child. When I got sick as a child, I used to worry I would die, and I wasn’t so much worrying about dying as I was that I knew if I died, everyone would be REALLY messed up b/c they had already lost R. I carried with me a fear of “dying young” clear into adulthood, and I still worry now and then about it, but I think the only reason I don’t worry so much about it anymore is I ain’t so young anymore. But unlike a lot of kids, I already knew children can die.

I also carried with me the realization that, had he lived, he and I would have been more like brother and sister instead of uncle and niece. Being an only child, it was interesting at times to wonder what that would have been like. Again, no big loss, just a wonderment.

But what R.’s death did was it made it so no Christmas could ever be completely happy for my grandparents. He would come up somewhere, and my grandmother would get all teary-eyed and my grandpa would get all sullen. You knew R.’s ghost had visited. They had to have imagined “Christmases that would never be.” You could tell that was on their mind once in a while. My grandmother used to rationalize some of it by saying things like, “Well, even if he had lived, he might have had to have gone to Vietnam, and we still could have been burying him, and that would have been just as bad.”

There were two weird things I remember well. One year for Christmas, I wanted one of those little tin miniature gas stations with the cars and the little gas pumps and the garage with the lift where you put the little cars on to “work on them”. I had gotten one from my grandparents but there was something “not right” about it. It didn’t look like the one in the Sears catalog...and the cars seemed more like “older models”. I pretty quickly figured out that was one of R.’s toys. Another year I wanted an .027 gauge train set—you know, the bigger ones, not the HO gauge ones. Again, the boxes looked “not quite right.” I realized again this had been R.’s train set. I enjoyed those toys, but it was a little creepy getting a dead kid’s toys for Christmas and realizing they are a dead kid’s toys, and all the adults not saying a word like they could put this over on me. Oooooo....another round of “Let’s pretend,” huh? I never told any of them that I knew.

I have no memories of him, obviously, but I found out things later...mostly when my grandmother was in the last few months of her dying of cancer. She got to talking a little about R. one day, and she got to talking about those 8 months we were both on the planet together. She told me that they were all worried about he would handle my arrival and they all got quite a surprise.

She said, “We were all worried he would feel left out and it was just the opposite. He was crazy about you. Kept wanting to put his ear on your mom’s belly, and put his hand on her and feel you kick. When you were born, they would not let kids up to see the babies and he pitched such a fit we had to get permission for your mom to bring you out on the porch of Samaritan Hospital and he stood on the lawn because the nurses would not let him get close b/c back then they thought little kids had germs or something. Then when your mom brought you home, we had to get after him b/c he wanted to walk around with you and play with you instead of let you sleep. He wanted to take you everywhere with him. He would put you in the basket of his bicycle when we weren’t looking and we were scared shitless you’d fall out, but he would just ride around with one hand on you and you weren’t a bit scared, you just laughed. He wanted us to bring you to his Little League games. He would even change your diaper, and your grandfather wouldn’t even do that. The day he died we had to get after him that morning because he put you in his wagon and was dragging you around the yard and you kept falling out.”

Then she started talking about how at 8 months, I was not really “talking” so much as babbling but I had my own little language and I sort of had names for everyone that weren’t even close to their names, but she knew I was talking to a certain person b/c I used THAT word for that person. She said I called R. “Ghee-ghee”. After R. died, she said I crawled around the house looking in all the rooms going, “Ghee-ghee? Ghee-ghee?” and looking confused and that just tore them up.

I had never been told any of this stuff. I was not sure it was real, or whether she was just playing the “St. R.” card.

Then, after my grandmother died, and we were getting ready to put stuff in the sale, I ran across a small stack of black and white pictures that were buried in a drawer in my grandmother’s bedroom. They were pictures of R. holding me as a baby, and I realized my grandmother wasn’t making that stuff up she had told me. Some of them, he was cradling me as an infant, some of them I am a little bigger and he his holding me up on his hip with my arms around him, and one of them was in his wagon. But in all of them, he was simply beaming. He had a little resemblance to me, and the best way I can describe it is, if you have ever seen me beaming, there is a lot of that look in there in him, and “me as a baby” looks perfectly happy with the whole arrangement.

Last night, I was putting myself in R.’s shoes. Now, I have no clue what we all do when we end up where “light perpetual” shines on us. I have no idea how that fits in a plane where there is no pain and suffering. But all at once, for the first time in my life, I got to thinking about things that “never happened” with R. and me. Would he have taken me sledding, down hills that would have scared the bejezus out of most kids my age? Would he have hassled my first serious boyfriend? Would he have been the person I would have “debriefed” with on the phone when weird things happened? How would it have been having cousins that I will never know in my life, if he had lived, married, had kids? Have there been times, from his vantage point where he is now, that he wanted to “check in” on these insignificant moments in my life? Since I never really KNEW him, I have no fantasies of him. But HE knew ME...maybe it is different from his vantage point. Has he been at some time what we casually call a guardian angel and I never even knew it?

It must be really strange, being a child who dies, and have the sum total of the secrets of the universe thrown at you at the moment of death, and suddenly be imbued with knowledge “beyond adult”. I’m an adult, and a smart one at that, and that concept boggles MY mind. I can’t even imagine being handed all that information when you were an 11 year old!

When it is my turn in the barrel, will I recognize him? It won’t be like “making up for lost time,” but will there, when we are both in the same plane, a connection between us in some way? That is pretty mind boggling stuff!

His death left a hole in my family. It left a hole in me of which I have never really felt any sort of an “inheritance.” But I have a strong belief that among the people close to you, there are things about their “aura” that get incorporated in your aura, and we assimilate these things. I never knew this boy, but he knew me, and he interacted with me in a way that was very unusual for an 11 year old boy. Most 11 year old boys would not want to be dragging a baby around. Maybe it’s possible part of how I interact and respond to other people has a pinch or two of the “ground of his being” in me. I mean, I know people like my grandfather do. But I knew them. For someone that I do not really remember to have that power, well, that is big stuff. It opens the possibility that love that we are consciously unaware of affects us.

Ooooooo, and maybe that is (gulp) part of the power of Advent????? I think sometimes about “Jesus the person” and “Jesus the Christ”, and when it comes to Jesus the person, yeah, I know about him in a historical sense, but in a human relational sense “I don’t know the guy.” But maybe I do, and maybe somehow we are all connected by a pinch of the divine and he is able to love us in a way that most of the time, we are consciously unaware of it. Maybe we are connected to the Buddha, or Lao Tzu, or Ghandi, or Mohammed, or Mother Theresa in the same way, for that matter. I am not going to get hung up on any notions of Christianity having cornered the market on this.

But maybe one of the revelations for Advent for me this year is the recognition that a person I never knew can have influence on me. Maybe this is the modus operandi of Christianity. Who knows?