We are family!

(Originally published 6/23/2008)

I flew home a few weeks ago to attend what my family had dubbed my grandmother’s "Fake Wake." 2007 was a rough year for her. My freshly widowed grandma faced quite a few health scares last year, one which left her with an oxygen tank permanently in tow. She has always said that she wanted her funeral to consist of us throwing her ashes from a riverboat into the Mississippi River while a jazz band played. So, when she organized a family reunion where the main event involved a jazz band floating down the Mississippi, we all knew what she was doing.

Families have to be the most complex, yet somehow primitive, structures in society. How archaic, and borderline Neanderthal, is it that by the mere happenstance of sharing a gene pool that families are locked together for life? Family is your first lifeline. They feed you. They shelter and clothe you. They keep you from killing yourself as a toddler (or in my case, well into your early thirties). So it’s no wonder that you develop a need for them. It’s as basic as needing food and water. You simply need your family.

But it’s really not that simple. In a way families are an experiment doomed to failure. As people get older they change. And their values change. It’s inevitable that the people you started this journey of life with will not be the same people you remember them to be when you look at them through adult eyes. With each individual experience we all go through, from schools to jobs to marriages, wedges are placed between you and the ones you call family. Suddenly, you look up and twenty-five years have gone by, and the kid you remember playing GI Joe with wants to dog cuss you for voting Democrat.

I saw so many members of my family on this trip that I have not seen in a very long time. I saw some that I will sadly never lay eyes on again. People are getting older. Time’s marching on. And scattered about this big country we are each living our own lives and forming separate identities and experiencing different aspects of life that can push people further apart. Most of their Saturdays consist of shuttling children to various activities. Most of my Saturdays consist of violent hangovers and swearing off alcohol (again). But the one thing that not even the longest period of absence can shake is that sense of need I feel from those people.

I have 14 cousins total on both sides of my family. There are only 3 of us left without any kids. I’m the only one without kids in my thirties and I’m the only gay one. I think a lot of people feel the need to pity me because of that. I think because that parenthood path has defined them and molded them all in such a positive way that they don’t realize that there are many different paths to happiness. Happiness, in my opinion, is simply replicating the concept of family that you knew as a child. You can replicate it through procreation. But, as in my case, if that’s not an option, you can replicate it through the people you choose to associate yourself with outside of your bloodline.

I spent the remainder of that week with friends from back home, friends from grade school, high school, college and beyond. These are people I’ve known for as long as I can remember, people that have stood by me and without question will always stand by me. Then I flew back to Chicago and jumped right back into the circle of amazing friends that I have here. These are all people that I can fight with, people that I can cry with, people that will carry me when I need to be carried, and people that know that I’m always there to carry them. I remember while on the plane heading back thinking of having seen my family, particularly my sister and my cousins and the way they interact with their kids, that I saw that in their lives they had replicated that basic need of family. And I fully realized that even though I had not replicated that need in the same way, by having children and being married and living that type of life, there was still as much love and comfort in my life as theirs. I get all the laughter and tears, all the anger and worry, all the loyalty and acceptance, from what Bridget Jones would consider to be my "urban family," the family that you make outside of your original one.

As a single person living in a city like Chicago, a city that moves so fast that if you’re not strapped in you could fall to your death, I need family. There’s never been a question that I have an unnatural fondness for trouble, and like my cousins needing to know that their children are healthy and happy, I need my friends. And with that need comes the blessing of feeling needed in return. I have friends who have recently lost parents, friends who are going through wretched break-ups, friends who struggle daily with heartbreaking things that I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. But all the friends that I have are family. And just like my "real" family taking me in despite all the differences, I love all of these people unconditionally.

Everyone knows that old saying that you can pick your friends, but you can’t pick your family. Family is something so powerful that you can never walk away from it. It’s so much a part of you that you’ll never shake it and no matter how far you go or what kind of deals you make it’s there until the end. It didn’t take a cheesy Oprah-esque gratitude journal for me to realize that even though my path was definitively atypical, I have also replicated family in my own life.

So when the time comes to spread my ashes, I know that most of those in attendance will be of no blood relation to me. The children that I’ll never have obviously won’t be there, much less their children or my great-grandchildren. But hopefully whoever’s left can look around and feel the warmth and the history and the love, knowing that because my life started off with an amazing family, that I was able to replicate a family of my own.