Saturday, I’d helped to host a memorial at my Quaker meeting. Neither the deceased person nor his partner, who’d arranged the memorial, nor any of the guests were Quakers; because both once attended our Meeting’s Wednesday night sharing circle, the deceased’s partner chose to hold her boyfriend’s memorial at Friends Meeting at Cambridge. By design or by happenstance, the deceased person’s large, multigenerational family and a much smaller number of the partner’s adults-only family arrived hours apart. As host cum amateur anthropologist, this gap allowed me to interact with and to closely observe the deceased’s family. And discovered something.
Youngest of eight, the deceased and his family had grown up in Jefferson Park, a public-housing project in North Cambridge, now torn down. A tightly-knit community, apparently, I gleaned that everybody knew everybody’s business at Jefferson Park. And maybe got used to spending most of their time with family and those they’d grown up with? So why say something everybody already knows? Which might explain something about that family: they were not storytellers! (Of course, to be fair, having never attended either a Quaker-style memorial nor a sharing circle such as the one the deceased and his girlfriend had attended, no one had given any thought as to what they might want to share; the story they’d wanted to tell.)
Yet in a sort of disjointed, one member of the deceased’s family offered a little this, another added a little that, one amazing story emerged: One of the children, an autistic and non-verbal great-nephew, had gone to the hospital with his extended family to pay a last visit. This ten or twelve year old (whose non-verbal interactions I’d already noticed) hugged his dying great-uncle, “one last time,” as one contributor to this story put it, then that child and his immediate family left. In the hallway, however, that little boy told his mother, “He needs one more hug.” And went back to do just that. The deceased died soon afterward.
“He’d told you that?” I asked his mother, astonished. “Out loud?” She’d nodded.
“That is a wonderful story!” I gushed. She looked at me with what seemed surprise. But, perhaps, something else?
The next morning at meeting for worship, I spent more time reflecting on the story, itself; its message of the Ineffable. Beyond words. Mysterious. How the Love that great-uncle had generously extended to that child—and to all the children of his bounteous family, apparently—and that such a generous soul lay dying had so moved that always-silent child to speak? And to hug? What a gift!
During that shared-silence space Sunday, I’d felt such teary gratitude, too, to have grown up with stories! My grandmother’s stories of growing up in a huge extended family in Worcester who’d spent summers at their family’s farm in Princeton. The “Martin and Judy” stories I’d heard in Unitarian Sunday School as a child. And how, apparently, over time, I’d had the joy—and privilege, the luxury, it seems, I realized, remembering that mother’s face—to recognize what makes a great story. A telling story.
For as the mother of a child with such profound challenges, that woman might very well have been thinking: “My son’s special needs are not intriguing. And I am always exhausted!”
Maybe.
Beautiful story.