Blood Relations

We’re like white corpuscles.  My family, I mean.  When there’s a threat, we wrap ourselves around the threatened one.  When the threat is over, we let go and rejoin the pulse, pulse, pulse of life, knowing that we’re all in the same stream, one body. 

I was shocked several years ago to discover that one of my Dad’s sisters lived no more than ten minutes from the house I grew up in.  This one was Auntie Annie.  She always had a sweet smile, a benign kindness that loved us from across my grandparents’ crowded little room on holidays.  Her girls were quiet, kind of old-fashioned and homey, looking down more than at you, except during an occasional shared smile at something one of our five uncles did as they elbowed each other to be the wisest “Polack” in the room.   We had gone to Auntie Annie’s on one of our visits to my parents’ house, our few-times-per-year visits before they began to need us to visit more often.  We had visited because another aunt, Zoe, was there, visiting from her remote location in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan; the visit to Auntie Annie’s was a convenient way to see Auntie Zoe.  The visit was enjoyable, easy and comfortable.  As we prepared to leave, I mentioned to Annie how sad I was to know that all these years we had passed her house right by on our way to my parents’ house.  I told her that I thought it sad that she and my dad could be so close geographically, but have only rare contact.

“We Daniels are a good family,” she said.  “We come together when we need each other, when someone needs help.”  Her words came back to me this morning as I thought of our little family, mine and Kathy’s, this year.  When I wondered if I might suddenly die as a result of the aortal aneurism that my doc discovered in the autumn, our normal pace of loving and keeping in touch increased.  The kinds all clung to me and to Kathy, literally.  The kids phone calls were more frequent, their ears drawing our voices closer.  Our visits to each other were more frequent too.  Chris in Europe struggled, juggled, felt the distance and the logistic challenges of communication by cell and at work and on occasional broadband availability. 

When Amy faced a health scare a short while ago, all of us were right there with her, closing even the short distance in our loving, holding on to her.  When Chris hit a tough patch in his life a few weeks ago, our conversations were deep and long, our emails more frequent.  And in my own family, our recent visit to Chicago to see two of them drew my brother Dave and his wife all the way from Phoenix, just so we could be together after my close call with mortality.

We’re like white cells.  When there’s a threat to any of us, we’re there.  But we’re red cells too.  What Auntie Annie was trying to remind me, her sweet smile a touch stern, was that whether we’re clinging or not, we’re always blood.  When Kathy and I moved here to northern Michigan to retire, we doubled the distance to Margie’s in Cleveland.  With Margie and her husband Jeff, we have the reminder that we’re red blood cells too, constant in our finding love in the lungs of our lives and bringing it to each other without clinging.  Red cells kill if they cling, their clots blocking the flow.

We’re like red cells too, knowing that sometimes we accept the need to see each other passing in the stream, each following its own path, each finding love and spreading it around, helping keep the whole body healthy.  We're blood.  Yeah.

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.