EDITOR’S NOTE: Grieving the death of a pet hits people hard. For some, I think it hits harder than losing a human relative. If you are interested in talking about the loss of a pet for a future edition, please share some details at this form.
There was a stretch of about eight years where my classmates’ faces were all over the Weddings section of my college’s semiannual1 alumni publication. The happy couple — sometimes two classmates or people who graduated within a year of one another; other times an alum with a person marrying into our happy little cult2 — stands there smiling with all of the other graduates in attendance, sometimes holding a St. Bonaventure University banner or flag. Maybe there is a brown-robed friar that was called in from campus to perform the ceremony.3
We got into our late twenties and early thirties, and those wedding announcements faded into birth announcements. And now, in our forties, we’re starting to check for our classmates under the “In Memoriam” heading.
When we were kids, we couldn’t wait to grow up and be adults. To be in charge4. To have the money to buy whatever we wanted5. To stay up as late as we want6. Now we’re here and wondering what the hell we wished for.
When we were kids, all we wanted to do was hang out with our friends and play. We saw them every day on the bus and went to their houses after school and on the weekends. Now, we only see them at weddings and funerals.
This conversation came up while I was doing dishes one night during the holidays. I was relaying to my wife that my sister — who was in town — and I had made it through trips to Wegmans and Costco without running into any family members. We got in and out of the stores without any conversational roadblocks. It was a celebration for us.
(I’m not one of those people that you will see stopped in a grocery store aisle blocking the canned beets while yapping to someone. My earbuds are in, my hat is pulled down and I look up long enough to pick the right brand of wild caught line and hook skipjack tuna from the shelf. I approach my shopping trips as a walking stop sign simply because I don’t want to talk to anyone. This is problematic, though, when most of your family shops at the same stores as you. I’ve seen my cousins at the store. It doesn’t mean I stop to chat.)
My oldest child was nearby and had a confused look on her face. She asked, simply, “Why?”
Detour…
My family is complicated in a very Italian way. Italians tend to be matrilineal, which was the case in my immediate family. We spent our holidays with my mother’s side of the family with late-in-the-day visits to my father’s side for the obligatory visit. It was a situation compounded by a genuine dislike of my father’s stepmother — I’ve covered this in a previous edition — by my parents. The unspoken, but ever-present, underpinning of this conflict was religion. Why wouldn’t it be? My mother’s family was Roman Catholic and my father’s (largely) Pentecostal7. This was a wedge issue stretching back to my parents’ 1976 wedding, where my father’s parents objected to dancing and other associated shenanigans. Some real Shaw Moore shit.
Start adding these microgrievances together and they start causing some schisms and cracks in the family structure. It causes the kids to adopt what they have observed as fact and carry that around in their own lives. Ultimately, it leads to a lack of family beyond a shared last name and a wave while walking through the grocery store parking lot. The last time my uncles, aunt and cousins were all together8 was when my grandfather died in 2010. Prior to that, I’m not sure I could tell you when we were all in the same room.
My wife pointed out to my daughter that my father’s side of the family was pretty tribal9, holding to their immediate households and not really branching out beyond that. She pointed out that my cousins fall into that same block of people we knew from college or high school that we only see at weddings and funerals.
This is in very direct opposition to what happens on my wife’s side of the family where there is a lot of family togetherness and intertwinement in one another’s lives. Nearly 22 years of marriage plus seven more of dating and I’m still not used to it.
Further detour…
This topic got me thinking about something I read last fall in
, A.J. Daulerio’s newsletter on recovery, addiction and mental health. In one of his monthly check-ins, someone wrote:My family is meeting for my uncle’s memorial service this week. It’s being held at a fancy place, with speakers and “heavy hors d'oeuvres," which means there’s a possibility everyone will be even more fucked up on empty stomachs. I can’t say for sure since we haven’t all been together for more than a decade, so I’m doing my best to believe they are just as entitled to be different people as I am. There are still a few people who aren’t coming because they don’t want to deal with the constant dynamic of passive-aggressive judgment and condescension, but I’m hopeful age will have mellowed the most critical members.
It’s been hard to accept that the family I grew up loving and relying on doesn’t exist anymore and never will. Terrible secrets, addiction, and contempt will do that. I know I’ll be mourning the loss of my family identity more than my poor uncle, who blessedly died after a long battle with a horrifying cancer. All that said, I feel shockingly ready to be myself, relying on the knowledge that I truly love the person I’ve become and reminding myself that my wonderful life isn’t a fluke—I worked hard for this shit. I don’t feel worried about temptation, mostly just protective of the sense of joy and gratitude I’ve cultivated. If I manage to let my protectiveness go, maybe I can share this light rather than hoard it.
Family dynamics haunt every major life event — and all the little ones in between — but I never thought about how addiction makes that worse. I have joked throughout the run of Dirt Nap (especially in the beginning) about drinking my way through conflict. It was my taking the easy way out, letting the alcohol dull my emotions so I didn’t have to feel or think about, well, anything. I don’t know the pain that leads people to substance abuse or the curse of alcoholism. But, I think that a toxic family environment is a catalyst that turns any scenario into a nightmare.
The summer that my mother was dying, the aforementioned grandfather his wife would come out once or twice a week to visit. They would sit and talk, and always end the visit with them praying over her. I made a comment to my mother about it once —when I had a rare evening off from my night job and came home from my day job10 — before they left to witness the ministry of Fred & Josie.
My mother gave a sort of resigned “Eh” look and told me that she appreciated the company and it made them happy to pray. I get my bitterness from my mother’s side of the family, so I know that simmering somewhere in what was left of her was scar tissue from the years of perceived mistreatment at how my grandmother pitted her three daughters-in-law against one another in some weird hierarchical game of who do I like most.
The manipulation and mindfucking across nearly a quarter-century built up toxicity in the relationship between my grandparents and parents, and the hypocrisy of their visits of Christian healing visits, knowing that it was more for their souls than hers, had to have eaten away at what few healthy cells were alive in her body.
When my aforementioned grandmother died in 2007, there wasn’t a huge family coming together. Her sisters were insistent that they, not my grandfather, would be in charge of the proceedings and associated whatnot. Only one of the Paventi grandchildren was a pallbearer, a sort of token of participation thrown our way. I reluctantly took a day off from work to attend the funeral11; my wife didn’t. It took my aunt guilting my sister — and floating an airline ticket — for her to leave grad school and attend.
I remember what she said when I picked her up from the airport: “I want to make sure the bitch is going in the ground.”
Like I said, family dynamics aren’t easy.
Back to Weddings and Funerals
Weddings and funerals get linked together, fairly or unfairly, as life’s mileposts. They’re both considered celebrations of life, mostly take place in a church, and are extraordinarily expensive. And, depending on your religious flavor, they can each mark a beginning.
The wedding, in Judeo-Christian teaching, marks a beginning of two lives together. I don’t think I have to cite any Biblical or secular text for proof; you’re old enough to have heard that on multiple occasions.
In your 20s, you went to an endless string of these. Here we were, at our poorest, shelling out hundreds of dollars on gifts, travel and (in some cases) tuxedo rentals and bridesmaids dresses so that we could participate. It was our first dividing line, a sort of culling of our respective friendship herds. Selfishly, the imposed punishment for not attending my wedding was being cast into the wasteland of “People I Used To Know.” It was the same treatment we received for the one or two weddings that we declined to attend, either because of conflicts or just not wanting to go12.
Death is new life in Christianity; just as Jesus ascended into heaven so shall you. “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” (John 3:16) Same for Islam: “To those who believe and do deeds of righteousness hath Allah promised forgiveness and a great reward.” (Surah 5:9)
I’m not crazy about wakes or funerals, which is documented, namely because I’ve been to too many of them. I’m 46, so not only have I advanced to the parents-of-my-friends-are-dying stage, but also the figures-of-my-youth (neighbors, sports coaches, teachers, etc.). There will be more of these in our lives to come.
Something I read really stuck out to me. Roscoe Lilly, a Christian pastor from the Albany, N.Y. area, wrote this:
Funerals are where the reality of your worldview and its validity is brought to bear. Because if your worldview doesn’t bring you comfort and joy…yes, joy…during the loss of your spouse or loved one, you need a new worldview.
I don’t know about the joy, but I can feel the comfort aspect. The relief that the suffering is over brings with it a sense of peace. The suffering has ended and, though there is sadness at the loss, there is that level of comfort in knowing that they have begun a new stage in their being, whether you accept that as an afterlife or the most literal belief in the body’s life after death.
What does it all mean?
It’s a question I’ve been asking myself more and more frequently as I grow older.
We are the sum of our parts; the good and bad. We are a milkshake of good and bad genes, families, and experiences. Humans are social beings so we’re also constructed from the relationships we make. Our friendships and relationships change with us. Some people have lifelong friends from kindergarten or younger. Others have cousins with whom they are as tight as their siblings or friends. Ultimately, it goes back to the saying that who you are a reflection of the company that you keep.
Those friends from college? A select handful are among the family we have chosen. There have been some that I thought would be around longer, but no longer exist in my world for any number of reasons. My father’s side of the family are a series of acquaintances. My mother’s side is equally as complicated, with cousins in Japan and Las Vegas, though the latter has sort of disappeared.
I know people who are still exclusively friends with the same groups of people they had in high school. Cheers to them. People grow differently. My high school relationships waned as I found more common ground with schoolmates from the college newspaper and athletic department. That select handful from above? They came from this group and we’ll be on vacation together later this summer.
We’ll tell the same stories we told before and wonder what so-and-so is up to. We’ll fall down social media rabbit holes chasing names we hadn’t thought of since the late 1990s. They represent a web of relationships that are closer than people I share a last name with. Family dynamics and circumstances dictate a lot of things in your life.
And, without realizing it, we all reach a stage in our adulthood we start of some people as extensions of their family unit and others simply in terms of weddings and funerals.
Final thoughts on finality…
Dirt Nap is the Substack newsletter about death, grief and dying that is written and edited by Jared Paventi. It’s published every Friday morning. Dirt Nap is free and we simply ask that you subscribe and/or share with others.
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Semiannual means twice a year. Biannual means every two years. Some people go nuts over your/you’re. This is the one that drives me up a wall.
St. Bonaventure University alumni, on the whole, are militant about being St. Bonaventure University alumni. It’s not unheard of to have a long conversation with another alum that you’ve never met previously about your time at the college and walk away from that conversation without ever having learned each other’s names. It has happened to me at Wegmans on so many occasions.
My wife and I did this back in 2002. We took the picture with the two dozen or so alumni in attendance. No banners for us, but we did call in Fr. Dave from campus to perform the ceremony.
Though not in charge of anything in particular.
The G.I. Joe aircraft carrier, namely.
What I know now that I didn’t know then: Making it to 10 p.m. is a struggle.
My father was largely indifferent on the matter. He attended mass every Sunday and volunteered at our church, but wasn’t an active participant in the service.
My mother died in 1997 and one of my aunts on my father’s side passed in 1998.
There’s a better chance of my grandfather rising from the dead than a Paventi Family Reunion.
Working two jobs during your college summers is one of those rites of passage that have long passed. One of the best jobs I ever had was as the night closer at a gas station. All sorts of characters plus the owner let me buy beer to take home.
PTO days are precious things. My grandmother was not.
Yes. We skipped weddings simply because they were inconvenient. What can I say? Not yours. Your wedding was lovely and/or we couldn’t make it because we had another wedding to go to, or something like that.
I just went through a wedding and funeral gauntlet. After my my passed on the 6th I drove down to NC on Friday the 7th to be with my dad and brother and do some of the grim but necessary tasks. Drove home on the 9th only to turn back around on the 13th to drive down for my nieces wedding. Which was great but getting told at a wedding how sorry people were for my loss, was a little jarring. Spent Father’s Day with my dad and brother down there, drove home Monday and then had my moms calling hours and full on Catholic funeral on Wednesday and Thursday. This sandwich generation stuff is exhausting.