it feels something like offerings at the birth of christ. when we arrive to nebraska my husband robert’s beloved aunts gail & cindy gift him stacks of ancient cigar boxes brimming with pieces of his missing family history. pictures of his aunts with his father, their brother, first as young children and then as young adults. a second box reveals more extended family and a fading glossy rectangle of my husband as a toddler sitting with his cousins on a late eighties outdoor couch. none of the children are looking at the camera, more interested in what’s going on next to them or just out of the shot. we discern from the ages of everyone that the picture was taken in 1988, a few months before young robert’s world would be changed forever. in the picture he’s holding his baby cousin, christopher, he won’t meet chris again until this trip to nebraska, they are both well into their thirties now. as he flips through the decades of frozen memories, taking it all in another cousin from the picture sits fully grown and across from him at a pizza hut off highway 75 in sabetha, kansas. cousin paige has left her own young boys at home in texas for 36 hours to show up for and be with her grieving cousin and his family, her family too. to see paige and robert together now is to know love and belonging, what family should feel like and rarely does. more siblings than cousins these two, i know their hearts beat with gratitude that they’ve been reunited but i can’t not think about the ache of having to lose each other in the first place.
i keep telling people “my husband’s father died.” at first, i find it interesting i’m not calling him my father-in-law and then it just makes me sad (and a bit angry). we didn’t get the chance to be in-laws, even though in the short 16 months i knew him he and his sisters accepted and welcomed me as their own, as a part of their family. each in their own uniquely tender & big-hearted ways. it’s true that tony and i only met once, but some times and with some people, once is enough. when we left our first and only visit together, he wrapped me in a great-big bear hug and thanked me for loving his son. i slipped him a small pink stone for his pocket and told him through tears i hoped the rose quartz would remind him how loved and thought of he is and was even back then in all the years that were lost, in all the years without pictures..
about this poem
this is a continuation poem, part 2 of a 3 part poem that centers around the loss of my father-in-law tony. part 1 is a couple poems back on my site, it’s called ‘two-minute warning’. this poem is a glimpse at compounded grief or the stuff we sometimes don’t even realize we’ve lost until we begin to understand the gravity of what we lose when we lose access to our families and our family history. thanks for reading! xo
santos scribes 
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