Family Matters

It seemed like the end of an era.  I learned last week that my late cousin's widower had died.  This week's post brought a neat, handwritten card from their daughter, advising me of this fact, and also relating the death last month of another cousin, whom I hadn't seen for years, but who was still on my Christmas card list ... something that seems to govern regular, albeit rare and inexpressive communication between distant friends and family members.  As I've got older, this topic has ceased to be a morbid one, and if you find it so, dear reader, then I can only apologise.

Even in this clinical and post-modern age, death is inescapable ... and especially so in big families.  My father was the eighth of nine to survive infancy from a family of twelve.  Two of his siblings didn't marry, two more didn't have children, and the other four had a total of twelve children between them.  I remember him making a comment - probably in the mid-1970s - that there seemed to have been family funerals every year for ages. This wasn't actually the case; in fact there were five deaths of either siblings or in-laws in the '60s, and four in the '70s, but with two in three months at the end of 1976, it must have felt that way to him, and as he got older, he must have been wondering when his turn would come.  He lived another ten years.  The death of his youngest sister in 2002 ended that generation.

As the son of a youngest son, my birth was followed in almost annual succession by the first three daughters of the next generation, as the grandchildren of my father's eldest siblings began to arrive.  It was one of these three who had written to me this week.  I believe it was her mother, just over two years ago, who was the first death of the next, i.e my, generation.  I can't be certain about that, because there are - or were - a number of cousins with whom I have had no contact for decades.

The man who has just died, although not a blood relative, played a significant part in my early life, as I indicated in an earlier post of this blog. He and his colleague Geoffrey not only ran the shop where I spent much of my spare time in my mid-teens, but were also good friends outside of work, being two of the leading lights in the town's Cage-Bird Society, and their Autumn Show was an annual highlight for a bored schoolboy, albeit one who had no interest in birds.

One thing that does intrigue me I only discovered in the last few years.  I wonder whether Cyril had any idea that there was possibly a distant and contorted link between his colleague and his wife's family.  It appears that Geoffrey's aunt's second marriage was to the great-nephew by marriage of Cyril's wife's great-aunt.

What a small world we live in!