All Things Are New

By Beck

By the time you read this, it will be 2009, although right now while I am writing this it is still the very dregs of 2008 and all of my kids have feverish, snotty colds and we’re watching Wall-E and eating appetizers – the usual New Year’s Eve pattern for us. Even with the sickly little boogers, it’s still a surprisingly pleasant evening. It’s been a surprising sort of day.

My mother has a much younger sister who is only nine years older than me, and this sister has always been beautiful and slim and athletic and young and had a partner who was handsome and smiling and athletic and kind and who was taken very, very cruelly by cancer two months before I had The Baby, in what will be four years ago this March. I will not write any more on that because the whole thing was so awful – my pretty aunt a widow at 40, my laughing uncle gone.

I have to tell you that each of those previous words physically hurt me to write.

My aunt remarried two summers ago, and settled into life as stepmother to her gentle new husband’s teenaged daughter, settled into their new house with their little dog and their jobs – bittersweet, as life so often is, but full of the business and good times that life can have, and we all thought that this was the happy ending to a tragic story. Then she announced something today and I am shocked, shocked, shocked.

My maternal cousins and I were mostly born in a tight five year span – me at almost the very beginning, and then the rest following closely behind, with a few stragglers for a few years afterwards, ending 23 years ago with the birth of my youngest brother, a full decade younger than most of us. There have been great-grandkids – a baker’s dozen – as we move from our startlingly wild youths into surprisingly sedate adulthood. Can you guess where this story is going?

2009 will see a new grandchild in my grandmother’s arms – the first child of her youngest child, an unexpected blessing for everyone in the family (my aunt’s voice still quavery with shock when I spoke to her today), a new cousin – a COUSIN! – for me. Oh, relentless life.

If I was writing this as a novel, I might end with a sleeping newborn being placed in my grandmother’s now fragile arms. I might end it on New Year’s Eve a couple of years from now, a little person wearing pajamas and wedged between her parents (I’m certain she’s a girl, although I’m equally certain that I’m wrong), with a sippy cup of juice and my aunt and uncle are exchanging wry looks over her (or his) head, pretending that this isn’t where they’d rather be on New Year’s Eve, watching some very simple movie that they know will have a very, very happy ending.

Travel safely, little cousin.

Beck writes at Frog And Toad Are Still Friends.