Kate: First Born or Borrowed

I’m going to be 31 in a few days. It’s the oldest I’ve ever been. My back is going out, my hernia is sore when it rains, and I’m losing my hair. I’m the oldest I’ve ever felt. And I still feel younger than my cousin Kate, who was a year older than me, but is no longer with us.

It’s been 8 years since everything happened.

Since then, I’ve attempted to develop a clear perspective on the events and what I was thinking. As my mom always says, “you learn something new every day,” and my perspective regarding March 2010 adjusts constantly.

At the time, I was undone by circumstance. Now, I see that I had spent my entire relationship with my cousin Kate trying to find out where she was coming from, or where her mind had gone. Before she went missing, she had been missing.

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When we were kids, we spent a lot of time schlepping back and forth from Jersey to Philly to visit Kate’s mom in the hospital. Piled into the beige Ford Taurus station wagon, air conditioning blowing engine air back at us, we would tell jokes in the car to pass the time. They were called “Heiney Stories” It’s a boilerplate joke construction: Heiney and His Mom go to do something (have dinner, buy clothes, skydive, etc) and something happens which results in Heiney’s Mom screaming to a third party about “MY HEINEY!”

I.e. “Heiney and His Mom go skydiving. Heiney gets right up to the door of the plane and is about to jump when His Mom sees that Heiney isn’t wearing a parachute! She yells to the pilot “DON’T LET MY HEINEY OUT OF THE PLANE!”

If there is a hierarchy of silliness, this sits pretty close to the top. In the telling of it, one practices their public speaking as well as reverse engineering joke constructions. My mom, my dad, my brother and I all took our turns. And then we’d pass the baton to Kate. And every time we did, the game would screech to a halt. Kate would not play the game. She would not stick to the script:

“Heiney and his mom went to the mall. And they found a sale for good school shoes. And then Heiney’s Mom took a phone call from work and she had to leave the store so Heiney also left the store and pondered the mysteries of the universe…” See where I’m going? No? Yeah, neither did we.

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Kate played her own song, wrote her own epic, and directed her own movie. The following is my attempt to tell the story she never got a chance to.

Also: My family (and all associated acts) is my family. No matter how I may describe them in the following story, I remain ever stalwart in their defense.

Lastly, a truth: Family is the social construct that teaches us forgiveness.