News of the death of my dad’s youngest sister was not unexpected but a jolt all the same.

For years, she had been something of a cypher in my awareness, originally when she came home from college or later in her visits from California, far from our Ohio.

Mom’s family, apart from her stepmother, was largely non-existent, except for a few encounters in Indianapolis, central Illinois, and Missouri. And she had her differences when it came to Dad’s clan, which did filter my perceptions.

I really didn’t understand the array of uncles, aunts, and cousins until I got heavily into genealogy. Before that, I was rather amazed at (and baffled by) the connectedness of one girlfriend’s Jewish family, which seemed to have cousins everywhere. Just what was a second cousin, anyway, much less removed a degree or two?

When Dad died, though, after a decline to Alzheimer’s, his last remaining sister insisted on flying out to the funeral, along with her husband.

And that’s when I finally got to know them – personally rather than abstractly. Thankfully.

The revelation began when she and her spouse, my Uncle John, came down the gateway at the airport and he swept our youngest up in a big bear hug while proclaiming, “It’s so good to have another Democrat in the family!”

The kid had no time to be appalled. He was instantly high on her list of rare approvals.

It was an effusive side of him I’d never seen. He was, after all, a retired University of Southern California dean and an ordained Presbyterian minister. And he was a warm, fun-loving guy. Who’d a thought?

It was the beginning of many other revelations over the next several days.

Slowly, I realized that his wife, that baby sister my dad called T.J. rather than Thelma, stood halfway in age between my dad and me – much more in my direction, that is, than I had thought. And it also dawned on me that she was the last person who might be able to answer many of the questions I had accumulated regarding my grandparents. Except, that is, she was equally in the dark on many of the answers.

In the months after the funeral, that questioning led to a fascinating round of correspondence between her and me and, at her insistence, our cousin Wilma, six months Dad’s junior.

It was an extraordinary research project, actually, one you can read as the Dayton’s Leading Republican Plumber sequence on my Orphan George blog.

At last, I came to know my grandparents for who they were rather than what they were supposed to be or weren’t. But I also came to know and appreciate T.J. and John and Wilma, too, and so much of what I had been missing.

As I learned, only Dad called his sister T.J., so I felt a responsibility for keeping the moniker alive, especially for some of the reasons she expressed.

~*~

Leap ahead, then, to a letter I had from her a few months ago relating that Uncle John had died of cancer – and that she, too, now faced a terminal prognosis. She agreed to chemo only to buy time, as she said.

That led to a long, difficult letter from my end and then, to my surprise, two phone calls – we had never talked on the phone, for whatever reasons. These two, of course, were strong exceptions.

On the second call, I shared the news that Wilma had passed over after Christmas, having reached the 100-year-old milestone. T.J. was glad I had included her.

And then, a few weeks later, a first cousin reached me by email using an address he was uncertain still worked – I’m not sure we had ever communicated that way. Usually, it was the annual Christmas card and letter exchange.

He had the sad news, as he said, that T.J. had died after a week in hospice, her body weakened but her mind still alert.

~*~

Thus, within a few months, the last three of the generation before me in our family have died, and that places me next to the top in the senior generation that emerges. Or the oldest male, if that matters. Not that I’ve heard from most of the others in years.

What strikes me, though, is a sense of exposure or vulnerability, like having a roof or an umbrella blown away overhead. Like it or not, I’ve moved into that elders edge that they filled. No longer do I have those more experienced to turn to, and I’ve been feeling how inadequate I am in comparison to the best of them.

Not just in the family, either, but within my religious circles, too. I’m now the oldest surviving former clerk of Dover Meeting, for instance, with all of the institutional memory that’s supposed to embody, even as I now reside 300 miles away.

What I have to also observe, with gratitude, is that through them, I’ve also known blessings and perhaps even wisdom. May I pass those along, too.