Family Reunion

I heard an interesting theory about why it seems that time flows faster the older you get. When you are young you don't have much of an internal database to compare to. As you get older and gain experiences the database grows. When you are young a month may seem like forever because it might comprise a large percentage of your database. When you are middle aged or older a month is an insignificant percentage of the database so it seems to have gone by faster.

I went to a family reunion this past Sunday. It has become an annual event the first Sunday after Labor Day for our family to gather together and talk of old times. We talked of fishing trips, places long closed and people we had known. It was a typical reunion; kids running around playing games no adult could understand, falling down and getting up laughing, falling down and getting up crying.

As with all reunions there were people missing, some had to work, some were so far away the trip was too long and some had 'gone the way of all flesh'. This was the first reunion since the death of my sister Nita.

Nita wasn't the first of my siblings to die but she was the first I knew of. Growing up the family I knew had five kids, I was the youngest. Bill was the oldest then came Nita, Vernon, Jim and me. The recent changes in the law meant I needed to get a certified copy of my birth certificate to renew my drivers license. I have had a birth certificate from Bethany Hospital in Kansas City, Kansas since I moved away from home after high school but it wouldn't do for this.

I received my birth certificate and was looking it over when I noticed some boxes with information on previous children my mother had. There was a box for still born children, which showed zero; there was a box for children born alive who were still alive, which showed four; and there was a box for children born alive who were no longer alive and it showed one. I asked my brothers what they knew about it and the only thing I found out was that it was a girl.

I had lost two sisters the same year, yet separated by a half a century. I had mourned for Nita but how could I mourn someone I never knew, someone I never knew existed? I have no memories, there is nothing but a void where they should be, I don't know, something.

In the end I didn't talk about the sister I never knew and I talked very little about Nita at the reunion. As the Bible says there is a time for everything, but everything has its own time. A reunion isn't a time to mourn, its a time to renew acquaintances with the family we grew up with. You talk about the good times, the funny things that happened and yes, the sad times. But a reunion is not a time to get maudlin. Focus on the family here and now.

I thought I'd share with you some things about Nita that I remember. Nita (short for Juanita) was tall and pretty strong (as a younger brother I would say she was too strong) she was, as they say, sharp as a tack.

Nita had it rough for a long time. When I was a kid Nita was married to a guy I barely remember, she was 12 years older than I am, the marriage didn't last and Nita remarried by the time I was 10. Her second marriage produced two daughters, Diane and Denise, who are not that much younger than I. Although it lasted a lot longer her second marriage also ended in divorce.

Third time's the charm as they say and Nita married Jack Gilbert, a man who was as good to her as the preceding two had been bad. Nita and Jack lived in Bonner Springs, Kansas. He worked construction and she worked in a bank when they first got married. At one point the two bought a truck and traveled the U.S.A. together with their little poodle dog Gidget.

Trucking was something she loved but it's a hard life and eventually they sold the truck and got new jobs to get them through to retirement. After retiring Nita took up interests that had lain dormant for years. She began drawing and painting, something she loved since her school days.

In our phone calls she started ending by saying "I love you", something that our family just didn't say. Oh sure, we loved each other but it was rarely voiced. Hugs were for girly men and it was handshakes all 'round for the men in our family. Nita changed that. I started saying it to her when finishing a conversation and I even said it to my brother Vernon when he'd call from Washington state.

Nita was 62 when she died. These days that's a short life. She lived it well.

Goodbye Nita, I love you.