I was mildly taken aback when my phone rang today and the caller ID announced that my Grandpa Graham was calling. His widow, Dorris, had called me from his cell phone a few times after he died, but it had been months since the last phone call.
Calling Dorris had been on my list of things to do for the day. She sent me a $25 check earlier this month and I had copied her phone number off the check so that I could call her home phone and thank her. She beat me to the punch, however.
The $25 check from Dorris meant a lot. Even though she was my step-grandmother and I’ve only met her a handful of times, she is – for all intents and purposes – the only living grandparent I have left.
Every time we talk she tells me she loves me which is a bit strange. As I said, we’ve only met a few times. But I’m the granddaughter of a man she loved enough to marry and a man she lost not too long ago. So I don’t question that she loves me. She’s family.
Her phone call got me thinking about what family really means.
My sister, Wendy, isn’t really my sister at all – in the technical sense of the word. She was a step-sister who took my father’s name in her late 20′s for reasons I won’t go into here. She calls my dad, “Dad.” He is her dad. And she’s my sister now. We don’t talk much – though lately we’ve been in touch thanks to the wonders of Facebook – and I rarely see her. But she’s my sister. She’s family.
And there’s my Aunt Sally – who isn’t an Aunt at all, but my mother’s best friend. Yet she cares for me just as much as my mother’s sister. She slept in bed with me the night my brother died so I wouldn’t be alone. She feels like family. And her son, Karl, I consider another cousin even though there isn’t a speck of shared blood between any of us.
Aleah isn’t my daughter. She came with the marriage. But she’s my kid and I am very much a parent to her.
And there is Sandie, my best friend, who I am more a sister to then her own sister ever was. If you ask Sandie, she has three sisters – the one that, unfortunately, came with the package deal of being born an Allen and the two, Rachel and me, that act like sisters to her.
And there is Brad, my brother-in-law, who I feel an affinity for that isn’t far removed from the love I had for my own brother, Brian.
I used to kind of feel like I was making it up as I went along, forming these familial bonds because of something that I was missing – a sibling or a cousin that lived close enough that I could see more than once every five years. But thinking about it today, I realized that I’m not making up anything. There’s the family you were born into and then the family you gather along the way to complete the circle.
Bloodline doesn’t necessarily dictate much more than who you start with.
