A distant member of my family died. We were not close and I hadn’t seen her in years, but it matters to me that she’s gone. Especially that she suffered and despaired and killed herself.

It’s weird that I keep thinking, “This branch of my family has hurt too much.” As if any family has an allotment of just X amount of sorrow and they’ve been served more than their fair share. But it feels that way. This one branch of my family tree has lost two adult daughters — one to a wreck and another to suicide — and their grandmother to cancer.

Of course people die, and it never seems fair or timely. But three shortened lives are hard, hard blows to bear.

As I get older and walk further away from my childhood religious faith, the stark ending of a life without hope of a hereafter is a piercing thought, too. I can understand why people choose to have faith in God. It must be comforting. I’m glad my family has that.

And how selfish of me, among these thoughts, to feel a pinch of resentment and hurt that no one in the family — even those in touch with me by email — thought to mention this woman’s death, when she died nearly two weeks ago. I happened to read about it in my hometown paper. Are we so far out of their hearts and minds that they think we wouldn’t care to know?

They had other things on their minds, I know. The shock of suicide. The grief that follows. But still. Two weeks.

In recent years, an elderly aunt on my father’s side also died after an extended illness. We only heard about it many months later, so that’s when I got the hometown newspaper subscription so I wouldn’t be quite so out of touch. And yet when I read about the death of this second-cousin-by-marriage, it still hammered me.

And earlier, back when my 10-year-old was a baby, my former stepfather died of lung and stomach cancer. My mom and he remained close after the divorce, and she had just spoken to one of his sons the previous week, giving them our phone number and address to contact us if he worsened. No one told us of his death either. Mom found out when she called the hospice to check on him and was told that he was no longer a resident. He’d died days before and the funeral had already happened.

I understand some things, but I will never, ever forgive my callous stepbrothers for how it hurt my mother, not to be able to attend Doug’s funeral.

As for my mom’s side of the family, I’ve talked about organizing a reunion once a year so we’ll all be able to catch up. I don’t know if it will happen. I’m sure my extended family has the same problems I do: I’m already drowning in the tedious, happy, and stressful details of my own life with two kids, health problems, a live-in elderly mom, money scarcity, conflicting goals and priorities, and too little time. Not sure I could stand to add one more thing to my list, any more than I’m sure I can afford to ignore this.

Maybe I should just accept that my father’s family and my mother’s family are just not close-knit anymore. Or maybe I should just suck it up and see what difference I can make. I don’t know which way I’ll go.

What do you do with choices like this in your life?

Love is not just in the big investments — buying you a car or paying for your college education. And it’s not just in the “right” answer to questions like, “If both of us were drowning and you could save only one, who would it be?” or in making sweeping declarations of, “I love you so much, I would die for you.”

It’s also in the small, homely gestures. Like the fact that my husband does laundry on his days off and hangs my hand-washed hosiery to dry on the shower door, or how he brings me the paper each morning because he knows I like to read the funnies while I’m doing my makeup. And the fact that I’m dragging my non-morning-person butt out of bed at 4:30 a.m. again to shower and get dressed and be ready to take my daughter to before-school tutoring at 5:45. And that — on my way to an insanely early work day — I’m stopping by the drugstore to pick up some makeup she mentioned needing last night; not that she would remember it by tonight, anyway, but because she asked something reasonable and I can say “Yes.”

And because she’ll feel a warm little spark when she sees the package on the bathroom counter tonight and will know she’s remembered and loved.

What small acts of love have you given and received today? I’d like to know. It makes me feel all warm and fuzzy when I see someone’s thoughtfulness for another.

Photo credit: JerryZz

Technorati Tags: thoughtfulness, small acts of love

On the far left and right are my mom and dad, Frances and Robert Ray Gaddy. In the center are my Aunt Doris and her first husband, Ray Welch, on their wedding day. My mom’s dress: Lime green. Men’s suits: Gray. Ties: Brilliant colors. Dad’s shoes: Blindingly white.

I’m finally doing something about the stacks of dog-eared family photos we’ve stored in boxes for years. Mom and I just spent two hours going through photos from the 1940s-1970s and a few earlier; the earliest was from around 1919, when her older brother was a little boy. (Mom is 80, born in 1928, the same year the world first saw Mickey Mouse.)

I wrote down Mom’s running commentary on a big Post-It note stuck to the back of each photo. She remembers who got married to who, who changed his mind about becoming a Catholic priest, and who had to drop out of nursing school when caught cheating on tests and allegedly stealing Demerol. Weddings. Days of skipping school. Graduations. Family gatherings. I’m fascinated by all the tidbits she still knows.

And it’s funny the odd bits of flotsam and jetsam we’ve kept for all these years. There are two picture of a puppy flopped down on the back steps of a house when Mom was in high school. Wasn’t her puppy; she thinks it was a neighbor’s. So we have two circa 1944 photos of a dog that wasn’t even ours. :o)

My goal is to scan all our photos in on my Flickr account and to get relatives to start logging on and helping me fill in the details. I’m sure they’ll also want to download some and make copies, and I’m hoping they’ll either upload some of their own or let me borrow them so I can do that. I’ve suddenly, belatedly, realized that my mother’s generation is almost gone and I’m just a few years away from losing all this family history if I don’t write it all down, right now.

I hope you do the same for your family. That’s too rich of a tapestry to let it disintegrate into dust.

Technorati Tags: family history, Flickr, Mom, Daddy, Aunt Doris, family photos