The Adolescent Spectrum
The 2005 Louisiana trip was where I really began to see the world around me in a whole new way. There were so many aspects of that particular vacation that made it stand out from the other ones I’d taken in the past, such as the fact that it was the second time I’d been out of state since Colorado in 2003, it was also where we got to see actual post-Hurricane Rita disaster areas, and it wasn’t exactly a “vacation” since we were there to spend some quality time with my uncle Keith before the cancer finally killed him a year later. Given these facts, as well as myriad of other interesting occurrences that took place during the trip, it seems odd that the one memory that constantly stands out in my mind when I look back is me standing in Uncle Keith’s living room, looking at the framed pictures and posters on the walls. In context, however, it actually makes sense, because they were all of Uncle Keith throughout his life and they all said the same thing to me: “Get your head out of your ass and look!”
I think most people can agree with me that in our early, formative years we can be remarkably self-absorbed. We see those around us as merely existing to fulfill a role that gives us a sense of security. It’s not necessarily an evil way of thinking; kids need mothers and fathers and siblings and grandparents to play a role in their lives. Yet this frame of mind can often cause us to think of these people as having no substance, with nothing more to them than how they affect us. Parents are supposed to provide for us, shelter us, and later get out of our way when we want to express ourselves. Siblings are supposed to do activities with us and give us positive feedback. Grandparents are supposed to send us checks on our birthdays and generally let us mooch off of them, and so it goes with aunts and uncles, et cetera. The most important people in our lives are reduced to caricatures, and we hardly ever allow ourselves to think of them having lives outside of our realm of vision. I was the same way. I allowed people into my life when it was convenient for me, and when it ceased to be convenient and they’d worn out their welcome, I quietly wished them gone. This wasn’t because I didn’t love them; I just loved my comfort zone more. It was that wall of framed photos and memories that began to change my mind. They told a story––a story of a talented young man who went to Julliard, wrote musical operas of "Tom Sawyer" and "The Hollow" based on The Hollow of the Three Hills by Nathaniel Hawthorne, and received widespread acclaim as a gifted composer. And as I continued to look at these pictures, I began to recall other things about Uncle Keith that I had known, but never appreciated in the proper context. I remembered how the whole congregation at my church, my family included, used to sing the hymn “Who is a God Like Our God” that Uncle Keith had composed. I remembered how much I enjoyed listening to a piece of music which he had written entitled “Icarus and Daedalus: The Fantasy of Flight” that was played on a disc accompanied by several recognizable composers including Michael Kamen and John Williams. And I especially remembered how much fun it was to watch him play the piano for us after dinner when he was visiting us the year before. But all these memories had been separate from each other for the longest time. Only now did they join together in one big panoramic display of what kind of man my uncle was. Only now did he become real to me. It was, at least to me, comparable to how Copernicus or Galileo must have felt when they discovered that the earth was not the center of the universe, and that the real miracle of our planet was that God had decided to bless it with life at all. Those discoveries made the human race aware of the wider world around them, and this discovery of mine made me more aware of the wider world around me; a world where I was not the focus of all things and where life did not begin and end with me. Uncle Keith had been alive before I was ever born, and his life had been rich and exciting and varied, and in some cases tragic. He’d been a musical prodigy, an excellent chef, a natural teacher, a delightful and energetic presence, a struggling Christian, a recovering drug addict, and now . . . a cancer patient. I was looking at the canvas of his life and realizing how little I knew about him. My parents had already enlightened me about Uncle Keith’s long battle with crack addiction. In fact, they told me when he came to live with us for three months the year before, he had done so attempting to break free of his bad connections in Louisiana. Those three months that we had spent hanging out with him and enjoying his company had in fact been some of the hardest months of his life, and I had been totally oblivious to it. But Uncle Keith didn’t have much time left, and there were no more secrets between us. His life was an open book now. Although I never personally talked with him about his bad years, after spending time with him and his family as well as in that moment when I stood looking at those pictures on the wall, I came to a realization. I was bearing witness to an entire life, with all the sorrow and happiness that any one life can contain. Uncle Keith was the first family member whose death I would be fully conscious of. And now I was viewing his entire life’s journey, from point alpha to point omega. And I thought about all the other family photos of my parents, grandparents, and elder relatives from their youth; photos which I hadn’t been able to take seriously because the people in them seemed . . . well, so similar to me. I had lived thus far with the unrealistic yet natural subconscious belief that my family didn’t change, that my grandparents had always been elderly, my parents had always been middle-aged and my siblings would always look and act the way they did now. It was the perfect setup because it gave me my own little world where nothing bad could get at me. Getting to know my family on a far more intimate level would make deaths in the family even more painful and scary than they already were to me. I was simply too chicken to reach out to my own family. It took Uncle Keith’s cancer diagnosis to force me to confront the larger world outside myself. It was, as I’d anticipated, painful and scary, but it was also incredibly enlightening and rewarding. Uncle Keith was facing his terminal cancer without bitterness or self-pity. The truth is the cancer had actually been a kind of blessing from God, since it helped him to finally break free from his crippling drug addiction and heal the rift between him and his family. For this reason, getting to know–– actually know Uncle Keith for the first time was not as hard as I feared it might be. I’m not saying it didn’t hurt to let him go in the end because it really did, but it gave me a sense of hopeful purpose when I saw him facing his end more happy and at peace with his life than I thought anyone could be. It showed me that a person’s life truly could be complete and that I wanted that same sense of satisfaction and faith before my death, which I began to accept was coming someday. But most importantly, it made me realize how remarkable each and every individual member of my family was, and how important it was to be as much there for them as they had been for me. The saying goes “No man is an island” and I agree. Every man is a world and all worlds are connected, so I couldn’t afford to close myself off in my own world anymore. |