Thirteen

I took a year off from doing this on July 23, marking the anniversary of my brother's death.  Last week I went back and read the old posts from years 7-11, and to tell you the truth, I think this might be a valuable thing to do.  But this really can't keep being about grief at this point, honestly I don't feel the sense of foreboding about this day that I did ten years ago or even five years ago.  Now it's just not that jagged, but I do remember this day, I can't really forget that this is the day that everything changed for our family.
As I have mentioned before in this regard, this is the time of year that a lot of people are going on vacations, and at my age, most of my peers have moved from going on vacations primarily planned by their parents to vacations that they plan with their siblings.  Not everyone, but enough people to make me realize what I'm missing.  This is one of the places where the presence of an absence comes back with teeth.
Another one of those places involves my daughter.  Caitlyn was born August 18, 2005, a little less than a month after Jon died.  She is going to turn thirteen next month and she is unabashedly, I would say even proudly, weird.  In that way she sort of reminds me of Jon, she is a lot more comfortable with her oddity than I was at that age. I see flickers of my brother in both my kids, and since Jack is a boy and from certain angles physically looks like Jon, I think I might note that more often, but I think there is a spiritual similarity between my brother and the niece he never even met. What I think Cate and Jon have in common is a sense that their strangeness is a good thing.  Jon learned to embrace the fact that he was not like a lot of other kids, he made a strange mix of friends (not always for the better).  The thing that I think everyone noticed is that he had like a gravitational pull with other people.
There is also this phenomenon with Caitlyn that her friends parent's seem to think she is a good influence on their children. People seem to readily invite her into their family activities. That's interesting to me because she can drive me up a wall sometimes, but with other people, her sense of independent identity seems to reassure them that she will not be swayed by hair-brained adolescent nonsense.  I don't know if it's exactly the same thing, but people used to take Jon places, neighbors with slightly younger kids would invite him places like the beach and on ski trips.  If my memory serves it was because, without really doing anything earth shaking he made their kids easier to manage.
I never got such invitations.  You might think, given how things turned out, that people got it backwards, but I don't think so.  I feel like I made people nervous, I was pretty inward and awkward, and not much fun most of the time. I'm still not much fun really, I spend too much time in my own head, and I actually need to do that particularly when I'm consciously trying to relax. I have to try too hard to be outgoing and fun. This was one of the reasons why, I realize in hindsight, that I actually liked spending time with my brother in those too few years where we were both adults: he could keep me going, he had plans and wanted to do things.  Plans and doing things seem like a hassle to me, but sometimes I want/need to have them inflicted upon me. Yet, he was also my little brother so I could tell him to bug off when I needed to without damaging our relationship even a little.
What I'm thinking about this year, as my little girl turns thirteen, and my brother has been gone for all of her life, is again about that permanently missing piece of our family.  I wonder about the effect that a relationship with her uncle would have on her life. Both of my kids are like me in the regard that we would all probably rather be left alone to read and do "self" things, I think we are all missing the dynamo that Jon would have certainly been for our little family unit. Deeper than that, since Cate is an exceptionally sensitive person, I wonder about how the grief that was such a constant presence in our world for so long shaped her experience of life through these childhood years.   I know these questions have no answers, but today seems like the day to ask them.