I'm thirsty

[Boogus Epirus Aurelius]

There’s a lot of famous literature about death.
There’s also a lot of television movies about it too.
The latter tries to make it relatable and understandable through really transparent plots that, more often than not, feature a little girl and her horse.
The former makes me ache.

I was doing some thinking at work this morning when things were slow and while I could flip on that bulky autopilot switch in my head and coast for a bit. And instead of focusing on things I might be doing next week or entertaining memories or drippy nothingness, I happened to make one mental glance over my extended family. And that glance led down a little cobwebby hallway into a room I rarely look around.

I have a healthy sized extended family. By today’s terms, we might call it “bloated” or “obese”. It’s natural and healthy to consistently alter our qualifications for particular labels.

If you were to take the collective bulk of my extended family on my mother’s side and visualize that bulk as a tree, it would resemble a sequoia, complete with burn marks at the base. But that’s probably pretty drastic.

And the whole family tree analogy is about as tired as people talking about death.
How about we start thinking about lineage and ancestry through something a little more modern.

How about the “family state highway system”? You have little county road branches and interstates and exits (for the deceased or the unimportant).

So, I have a fairly large extended family. The beauty of that, though, is that everybody gets along.

For the most part.

But I don’t have the creepy drunk uncle.
Or the overbearing christian aunt.
And etc.

There’s an effort made several times a year to all meet in one particular location so we can mingle and catch up, like a high school reunion or something.

Kind of like a “family reunion” or something.
I should coin the term.

But it’s never like that. We meet during major holidays and in the middle of summer and little subsets of the family might meet more than others.
And I enjoy it. I really do. It’s nice to see the dozens of cousins and their new spouses and children and it’s great seeing the aunts and uncles, trading stories.
But someday those aunts and uncles and older cousins are going to start dropping en masse. Think of all those funerals!

There’s a twitchy underlying panicky twinge that I get when I think of it. I’m not of the morbid or macabre variety but, realistically, it’s going to be tough when things get to a certain point, when that whole business becomes reality.

And am I going to get to a point in my life when I outlive the majority of them? Are the few survivors of the “now” generation going to collaborate and reminisce? I fully expect to be married and everything, but is that going to change how I perceive things?

I can’t even begin to picture how I’ll be as an old man.

[Travis]

I always think about these same things. Very weird