Love You, Cuz

For my cousin's funeral (which I was unable to attend because of traveling for work), I wrote the following. My sister read it to the congregation, which may not seem like a big thing, but it is. Bigger than you can imagine. Huge.

There are losses we can incorporate into our lives as time passes and those that simply never settle themselves. Those that we just can't manage. My cousin's death is that kind for me. He would not be happy with me about this and would give me multiple philosophical quotes to try to persuade me otherwise, but in the end we'd laugh, he'd call me stubborn and end the conversation with his usual, "Love you, cuz."

Here are my words, I hear them now in my sister's voice:

To understand the relationship between the Thurston and Cash cousins you have to first understand that we easily could have spent our lives not only not knowing each other, but not knowing either family existed. Our mothers were sisters who were separated by adoption and in the 1920s it would have been easy for the records to be sealed and the sisters to live their lives unaware of the family they had. Instead, we were blessed with magical time spent together in childhood and we brought those memories and a love for each other into adulthood.

For my sister, Penny, and I, time spent in Rockland with Rick, Jeff and Marcia truly was magical. Having no brothers, Jeff and Rick easily filled that void and we adored them for it. As we have mourned together this past week we once again were blessed to relive our memories of Jeff and found ourselves laughing and crying at the same time as we pictured him with his crooked smile, so much like Uncle Jay's, as he rolled the eyes of a lobster across the kitchen table, mixed mustard into his mashed potatoes or encouraged a friend of his, a clown in the Lobster Festival parade to march up to us and plant a make-up laden kiss on our cheeks.

While it is the simple things we cherish about Jeff, it is at the same time more than that. Whether the boy he was or the man he grew to be, we loved him. Jeff was a man of good humor (often off color and raucous, but good humor nonetheless), a man of integrity, a man of courage and a man with a deep love of family and God. He was a boy who gladly added his girl cousins to whatever game he played and then a man who encouraged, supported and loved us and our families.

To say we loved our cousin Jeff doesn't quite cover it for us. Those words feel inadequate to truly capture the special place we have in our hearts for him, but they are the only words we have. We spent the past week very much like we spent a long night on Frederic Street in Rockland as we waited for his return from the Viet Nam war, holding our breath, waiting and living with our memories.