GRATITUDE, DUDE

art: ms. vanessa

My cousin Donny is eight years older than me, and for a long time, he was the only other boy in the family. Though I adored him and thought he was hilarious, his Jersey lacrosse, boys-will-be-boys manner grated on my mother’s intense feminism, and so he was sometimes kept at elbow’s length.

Nineties family vacation down the Shore melted away with time and we all grew up and scattered, Donny to California, myself to NYC. All the cousins were rarely if ever in the same place anymore and I almost never saw Donny.

Some years ago I received word that he was fighting prostate cancer. I hadn’t seen him in who knows how long, but I sent him a text message, expressing my solidarity. He wrote back “Thanks cuz. About to give this thing a Jersey beat-down.” And he did, he beat it.

A few years later our eldest cousin Sandra was getting ready to leave us. Cancer again, but hers spread through her body and took her.

All the cousins came in for the funeral. I helped to load her into the hearse. It was silent with beautiful warm rain.

My little sister Julie and I went back to our hotel and smoked a joint. It was raining really hard now, and we sat in a covered doorway watching an earthworm squirm its way along the cobblestone, which had somehow been strewn with glitter. A fast walker burst through the door and stomped right on the worm as they went by. We gasped at the starkness of it. We smoked more in the silence of death, and after a few minutes, look! The worm emerged alive from a crack in the cobblestones and continued its journey, sparkling now in a coat of glitter.

One of our aunts had called ahead to the Japanese restaurant in Montclair to announce the large group, and as we arrived we were ushered into one of those curtained rooms with a low table where you take off your shoes and sit on the floor. It was BYOB, so I walked in my socks across the wet street to the liquor store and came back with a case of beer and a bottle of Jameson. Donny arrived, eyes lazy and red, cheeks wet. We were all crying, hollering, at least a dozen of us, crushing cans of beer and ripping whiskey from the bottle. I felt bad for the staff—we had invaded their hushed parlor with our Irish wake. I realized that Julie had hardly ever met Donny because she was so much younger.

“Julie!” He shouted, beckoning her over. She came, and I joined her by his side. “Remember this,” he sputtered. “The most important thing is gratitude.” Later, when we crashed the hotel bar and an aunt was asked not to climb on the pool table, he repeated the same thing in my ear under the shrieking laughter: “Gratitude, dude.” To be honest, it confused me. I wasn’t clear on the message, but it seemed really important.

Nana, of course, hadn’t made it to the funeral. Our matriarch had been in palliative care in an assisted living home for a while at that point, no one quite sure how she was still alive. About a year later I asked my mother to bring me to see her, and so we went. I didn’t know what I was going to say, but I suddenly leaned in close to her wheelchair where she slumped and told her “I just want to tell you how grateful I am, Nana. Thanks for everything.” My mother addressed herself to the clothes hanging in Nana’s closet while I expressed some eucalyptus leaves on her bedside table. In my distraction, I forgot to pay tribute to her collection of sea glass from Lavalette.

Driving away I thought of that glitter-coated earthworm in the rain.