A sad day for our family. We lost a cousin this morning in what should have been but was not the prime of his life, one month before his 49th birthday.
It was raining in his hometown a couple of hours after dawn. Reduced to near helplessness toward the end, he was being bathed when he quietly slipped away.
His record-keeping, photo-conscious family will not forget the day of his death. Three years ago this morning, he was diagnosed with brain cancer.
Strapping, vigorous, owner of a fulltime pleasant personality, he and his former wife have raised two devoted sons of the identical profile. Now in their early 20s, the boys were almost slavishly devoted to their slowly ebbing father, gently nursing him to maximum comfort.
Your World, My World
My cousin and I not only grew up years apart, but with vastly different congenital visions of how we would imprint our unique marks on society.
For my cousin and his siblings, including his kid sister who lovingly cradled him in his final years when both should have been outdoors romping, their world began in their front yard and ended in the backyard.
Even with the aid of a telescope, the most distant point visible was the beginning of the next block. Home, not outside activities in the wider universe, was the bullseye of their lives growing up.
Parochial people, they are.
The challenge in life, my cousin and his siblings were instructed, was to contribute qualitatively to your corner of the world, not to have a contest about which of you could cast the widest, loudest shadow. The land you grew up on is your obligation to improve, they were told. Their father, who lived into his 80s, seldom strayed farther than 10 miles from his birthplace. My aunt only lived 8 miles from where she was born. In the last 50 years of their lives, they rarely traveled more than 30 minutes from the huge old home they had purchased early in their marriage.
Their duty was to firmly educate their children in traditional moral, civic values that every American pioneer, every pilgrim, would recognize.
My cousin’s was that he dutifully packaged and handed over those values to his children.
He may have died early in life.
But given the impressive stewardship of his sons in his closing years, he lived longer than many of us will, long enough to see his legacy of values caress his aching body and his rewarded mind.
