The first thing I noticed this morning, as it often is after a late night with guests, was dishes. Dad was rinsing, mom drying - a pattern some forty-five years in the making. Liam, all of four years, was struggling to finish his coffee cake. His twin sister, Maisie, reclined on the sofa, sounding out letters in a book she can't quite read yet, while their older sister Audrey helped clear what was left of the breakfast table. My wife, Karen, put away the makeshift bar, noting that we had over-estimated the demand for beer (and under-estimated our guests' taste for rum). My sister Shannon sat at her laptop filing her taxes while her own twin, Erin, reclined in my father's chair with eight month-old Zoe, whose morning nap was long enough to warrant a remark.
We said goodbye to my grandmother last night in a scene amidst the kind of snowstorm that's common in New Hampshire at this time of year. Her heart, nearly ninety-three years old, had grown as tired as it was generous. There had been a brief service, at which I had managed a few words of remembrance to a crowd of people who knew her in a very different capacity than I. Later at my parents' house: a wake.
Very near the end of her life, my grandmother had related to me that she had come to find a special kind of joy in being part of a large extended family. I had associated that notion with milestones: first days of school, graduations, weddings, births, and even funerals - the milestones by which we typically measure the relentless march of family and time.
As the scene played out this morning in my parents' living room, set against the icy backdrop of Great Bay, I was aware of yet another possibility: that from my grandmother's chair (unoccupied this morning) she had found, in the mundanity of our routines, the coming and going, the celebrations and (occasional) arguments an altogether different working of definition of family - its story written not in neat chapters, easily sub-divided, but in the well-oiled mess of the morning after a painful goodbye.
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Abouth the author: Ian Fitzpatrick is a founding partner at Boston-based agency Almighty. He lives with Karen, Audrey, Liam and Maisie, just outside of town, and can be found on Twitter @ianfitzpatrick.
