11:17 p.m. - December 08, 2002
If \"family\" isn't accurate, then what is?
Awkward. The service was tangible awkwardness and I the confectioner's sugar, just enough to bring out the worst. Saw my aunts and uncle, the cousins. At the entrance there was my grandfather and uncle and I thrust out my hand to ward off uncomfortable, obligatory hugs. They both look terrible, and not just because of Miriam's death. My uncle turned to my cousin Sean (his mother was my aunt) and said, This is your cousin Jason and at that exact moment I was reminded nothing has changed over time with these people at all, and what surprised me most was the hostility I felt inside, the anger and self-righteousness I thought had dissipated but hasn't.
My family fell apart over money years ago when my mother was the sole inheritrix of a fortune, scattering not like dust but like refugees clutching possessions and each man for himself. I still remember my maternal grandmother telephoning to ask me to find certain jewelery to mail to her, ordering me to convince my mother to relinquish silver, to somehow find out what was in numerous safe-deposit boxes. It was crazy then and crazy now, especially when my maternal grandmother was wealthy in her own right; even today the house she and my grandfather built is known as the Big House, a huge monstrosity that still dwarfs the lodges and chalets built by the option-rich near Lake Tahoe. My mother divvied up the spoils, bought houses for everybody, established funds, tried to buy herself into her mother's good graces. But it wasn't enough.
To punish my mother, Shirley (my grandmother) disowned us and commanded my uncle and aunts to have zero contact, at risk of being disowned themselves. Rather dramatic a la Belva Plain or that woman who writes all those romances made into Lifetime movies, but that's how it happened. And her financial fatwa stuck until we are now strangers to each other. As it happens with money, disowning my mother wasn't enough; the rest of the family also collapsed one way or another.
I have always been angry about this.
I spoke with the two cousins I know remotely who clung to my sister and I tonight. We're all in the same boat, strangers because siblings and parents fought over nothing. They're not close to Miriam's children and they feel closer to us than anybody else--it's pathetic.
But I did not cause a scene though at the end I was ready to go and looked it. People stood to speak and said what a wonderful caregiver Miriam was, so selfless and giving, a wonderful mother devoted to her children, to all children, a gifted pediatrician with a special touch, a loyal friend. And I thought this is not the aunt I knew. My aunt Miriam would become angry at me when I beat her at Scrabble and let me go to class with her when she was a student at USF, introducing me as a budding physician. Other than Scrabble and USF, my only other concrete memory of her is being in her kitchen in SF with my aunt and hearing the word shit and smiling; Miriam said Jason, you didn't hear that and I said Yes I did and she tried to convince me I had not. I refused to concede. I think I was 6 if I'm accurate in piecing together a timeline.
I was jealous to see her husband's neices and nephews call her Auntie Miriam and recount birthdays and holidays spent together; maybe we all were. It didn't have to be this way but things happen.
My mother is upset sad feeling the loss and is imploring me to attend the burial tomorrow morning. I must be cold-hearted because I simply do not care to attend, I feel no compulsion, no miss, no desire to pay my respects. This is the loss I feel that I resent and am angry for, for having lost what could have been. Does that make sense? I haven't decided if I will go yet. It hurt to see them, these people I once knew and who once knew me, and have to introduce myself because we�ve forgotten who we are.
Decided against going tomorrow. I fulfilled any obligations long ago.
