Seeing ourselves in another's mirror

The occasion was the passing of my mother's cousin at age 94. He was my mother's father's sister's son. For most of the gathered, including Bill's four daughters, I'd not seen these folks for five to as much as 50 years.
I might not be thinking of myself as old. If, however, I haven't seen someone for 50 years, well, if it ain't old, it'll do until some other explanation comes along.
"We went straight from being children to being old," remarked one of my second cousins. "We skipped right over that growing-up part and becoming adults."
You have to let your vision relax a bit before you start to notice the family threads run through each of the faces. Listening, you hear the slight chop of a Finnish accent, even among the American-born. We swap memories of visits to this family's house, that family's farm, to the camp and sauna.
I have a scanned copy of a newspaper clipping of one girl who'd shot a deer. It was from the front page of the Gardner News. She called it her 15 minutes of fame. That was back in the 1950s. She lived a full and a good life, but that's what got her name and picture in the paper.


We jump past the old stuff and earnestly talk for a couple of hours about what's going on in our lives now. We learn of each other's talents, hopes, troubles, and fears and theirs sound like our own.
One has recently been sort of diagnosed as having MS, although it's not certain. "I think MS means 'Maybe Something.',"  There are stories of Alzheimer's, ALS, and  other afflictions. There are celebrations of good things in our lives, children and grandchildren, work and retirement, travel, and other fun stuff. The darker, awkward stories of divorce, depression, abortion, drug use, chronic unemployment, even those quickly get into the conversation because, well, frankly, because we don't have time to do otherwise. This is who we are, who we've become, and we need to know these things.
And then, just like that, the room was emptying. We promise that we'll stay in touch by email, Facebook, a phone call, a visit. (Several of the folks live right nearby.) We might even follow through on those promises. You know, though, how life gets full. A day becomes a week becomes a month becomes, well, you know.
We squeeze a half century of news into a couple of hours. Who are these people? How can I know them so well when, just a short while ago, we were introducing ourselves as though we were strangers?