"People travel to faraway places to watch, in fascination, the kind of people they ignore at home." - Dagobert Runes
It's 11:30 a.m before "The Kids" are ready to do anything. Being Sunday morning, they are in their familiar routine of the morning news shows and grazing for breakfast.
I've spent the morning working out and wondering what it was going to be like meeting her cousins.
Apparently, I've met some of them before right after my grandmother's funeral services. But I really have no memory of that. I should. But I don't.
I wonder how this is all going to go. Will there be a connection with these folks.
I go down to my Mom and Jack's room to wait for the cousins to arrive. Unfortunately, we can't go to their homes to visit. There's just no way that we could either get in the house with my mom's wheelchair or the restroom if she needed to use it.
Jack makes plans with me to do a little shopping once the cousins start arriving. My mom stays propped up in bed waitng for her visitors.
Her first cousin arrives and you can see my mom light up.
And it is because this cousin lights up a room when she walks it it.
Claudette gives my mom a hug, introduces us to her husband, and then the, as my grandfather would have called it, "hen party" begins.
She can't get over how much my Mom looks like Aunt Juanita (my grandmother).
She's clearly excited to see my mom and my mom is just as excited to see her.
They spend a lot of time catching up while the men in the room fade into the background. Jack eventually leaves to hit the errands that he wants to accomplish this morning. The husband of Mom's cousin also bows out for a while.
But I stay.
They say that your cousins are your first friends and it is clear to me that this is the case here. There is geniune affection coming and going both ways here.
She is a nurse and inevitably the conversation turns to the state that my mom is in.
Now I know daily that my Mom has had crying episodes. I mean, who wouldn't in her situation?
But I hadn't seen it yet.
Today, while with her cousin. I finally see a break in her composure.
And it tears me up.
Her cousin comforts her and my mom pulls it together.
This is why we came all of this way.
She needed her family.
She needed to be with her first friend.
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