Family Matters: Cousin Jimmy

          I got a letter yesterday that my cousin Jimmy died.  Two months ago.  His sister thought she'd write me, but then got busy and forgot, then finally remembered that she ought to tell me.  I was grateful for the news, but it was hardly shocking that a 75-year-old man with a history of kidney problems should die of a sudden heart attack.  And even if I had heard the news in a timely fashion, it wasn't likely to have caused much of a bump in the flat-line of my life in Florida, a thousand miles from Jimmy and his life.  I hadn't seen him in thirty years.  And yet I took the news badly.
          Jimmy and I are of the same generation, born within a year or two of each other, so his death and mine are one and the same from one point of view.  I can't be far behind.  And I'm hardly a well-preserved specimen of the species.  But that's not why I took the news so badly.  Not the whole reason reason anyway.
          Our grandparents, our parents, ourselves, and our children form a genealogical string that connects us.  Neither Jimmy nor I knew our Cifelli grandfather, who died about 1931, but we knew our grandmother, who died in about 1950, and we were first cousins of a generation that was born between 1905 or so and died out in the 1990s.  That generation of six brothers and sisters were all born in America, first-generation Italian Americans, youngsters who made their Old World parents proud by fitting so nicely into the fabric of their adopted country.
          Their children included Jimmy and me, the first fully realized Americans in our branch of the Cifelli clan with no ties at all to the Old Country.  Our parents rejoiced in their Americanism, spoke less and less Italian as the years went by, changed their diet to include turkey on Thanksgiving, and fought furiously for their new country against the old country in World War II.
          They all lived within an hour of each other, which meant my cousins and I were close--and not just geographically.  We were together often, especially on the holidays, our parents having huge dinners for the entire extended family and exchanging gifts for the little ones.  There were piles of black and white photos in boxes that have been long lost by now, all commemorating the milestones of a big family.  We were close.  And we children felt like what we were, the centerpieces of our family evolution.
          But of course, by logic and necessity the family slowly began moving away from Newark, New Jersey to the local suburbs, and eventually to other states.  We kids grew into parents and grandparents, with our own children and grandchildren taking center stage, a new generation totally unaware of the quirky personalities and the hard-working individuals whose blood runs through them, two and three and four generations back.
          That's why I took Jimmy's death so badly.  There was none of that old network of aunts and uncles and grandparents to mourn them, no one to call me in Florida at once so I might have joined the chorus of grievers.  I find myself mourning today not only Jimmy, but his dead parents, his dead brother, my own dead parents, uncles, aunts, and grandparents.  It is nothing less than the death of a genealogical tree that stretched  from the mid-19th century to the early years of the 21st.  I know there are new children who will push on and live out their hopefully wonderful lives, but they will not be connected to the personal histories that I am one of the very few left to remember.  It's silly to be oversensitive about these things--it's our common fate, but still, I hated to lose my cousin Jimmy.