Peter

My motivation to continue this blog is sustained by a small, core group of you, family and friends, who are interested enough to make an effort to check in here. I am under no illusions that this is great writing. Nor is this a place where I reveal any major truths about humanity. It is simply my corner to tell stories, admit uncertainties, and to reflect on the beautiful and panic-inducing responsibilities of fatherhood. If you were to lose interest in reading, I would likely lose interest in writing. So thank you, all of you, for joining me here. It means a tremendous amount.

I mention all of this because I lost a core audience member this spring: my uncle Peter. He passed away after a brief, unexpected bout with lymphoma, a disease against which he had no real chance, and which took him long, long before anybody wanted to see him go.

Peter was a fascinating guy. He blazed a trail from Lynnfield to NYC and seldom looked back, creating a professional life as a five-star fundraiser who rubbed shoulders with the rich and famous. (During holiday gatherings way back when, he would casually mention his trips with Liz Taylor, though from his affect you would think he was traveling with a B-lister.) His personal life? He never married, he loved dogs, books, wine and movies, and had friends from New Hampshire to Rio. It was tough to get more than that.

Peter's life was in New York, but he spent most Thanksgivings with us; first in Lynnfield at my grandmother's house, where he and his sisters had grown up, and more recently in Dover when my mother unofficially took over hosting duties. Conversation had a way of swirling around, through, and towards him, whether he was a willing participant or not (his occasional protestations that he "didn't want to talk about something" often went ignored). It was a burden he should have expected. He had the most interesting life of anyone at the table, and we all wanted to claim some of his time, some of his humor while he was there, in the flesh, among us.

Gammy and Peter, Thanksgiving 2011.

Gammy, Lisa, Anita, Mom, Peter.

I always looked forward to seeing him. His visits never disappointed. In the mid-90s, when we were still all crowding around my grandmother's impossibly-tight dining room table on Thanksgiving or Christmas, he would roil the crowd by asking what movie everybody wanted to go see post-meal. His sisters always chided him. "Peter! Nobody wants to go see a movie. Just stay here and eat." As they henpecked him, he rolled his eyes and offered that he was the only one in the family with any sense of culture. (This assertion went unchallenged.) And though he didn't abandon the argument, he didn't usually abandon his family for the comforts of a dark theater, either.

His needs were simple ones. Give him a drink, good food, a newspaper, and a conversation, and he was happy--with a big emphasis on that first item. In 2005, Thanksgiving was almost ruined when wine was somehow left off the shopping list. The next time he visited for the holiday, he brought a case.

Catching Peter was a bit like catching a ghost. He was hard to track down, and he kept his life private enough that he could disappear from time to time. But when he was there, in the same room as you, he was profoundly generous. I remember Peter treating me and a few high school friends to a dinner at Planet Hollywood (this was back in 1992 when Planet Hollywood meant something) during a Model UN trip to New York; somehow he managed to get us a table though the place was packed. He regularly took my grandmother to Tanglewood and the BSO (though one could argue this was low-hanging fruit for him because of his connections to both organizations). How she anticipated these trips, and how her face lit up when she reviewed them afterwards.

Peter was similarly generous, and apparently honest, in his appraisal of the talents of his relatives who would surround him on Thanksgiving. Peter loved Adam's music, well before anyone else loved Adam's music, and was heartbroken when failing health forced him to miss seeing Adam perform live this winter. When it came to greenhouses, my Aunt Lisa was tops. Her flowers were "fabulous," "the best." And this blog? He read it, and I gleaned from occasional twitter messages and emails that he liked it. "When is the book coming out?" he would ask. I laughed. I didn't care that he thought this blog was written well. (I'm not sure it is.) I just cared that he read it at all.

Peter's death was sudden. News came that he was sick, that he was fighting something terrible. Chemotherapy didn't work. His body was failing. Then, he was gone.

Life to death is such a stark transition. There is no middle ground here. But perhaps due to reasons of nature, or nurture, or survival, our minds are not equipped to comprehend this binary switch from on to off in the moment the switch is flipped, and so we wander about in a haze of knowing that a loved one is dead, but not believing it to be so. "He is dead, but I will see him at Thanksgiving." For a fleeting moment, I held this idea in my head without any internal conflict, thinking that both facts were true. Then, of course, reality, followed by grief.

After he died, my parents headed back to New York to be with family and to begin arranging the funeral. I stayed here. But through some convoluted process which I cannot begin to reconstruct, for an evening I ended up with the black leather valise that Peter had brought with him to his final hospital stay, and some instructions to look through it for any information about people we should contact.

A folded New York Times was inside, naturally. So were his wallet, his watch, his phone, and a daily planner/address book. Items from a life that he had planned to continue.

I opened the book intending to look for the name of his lawyer, but also to gawk at what were sure to be many famous names inside. (He knew a lot of people.) But the first page I landed on was my own. There was my name, next to Natalia's. Our Turner Street address has been crossed out and replaced by our new School Ave address. And above our names appeared three more: Andres, Celia, and Lucia. A succinct, accurate accounting of the past 10 years of my life. While I had been blogging, he had been paying attention.

I will not see Peter this Thanksgiving, nor any other. I will miss his voice, his literary and cinematic recommendations, and his unique blend of NY confidence and Lynnfield humility. I will miss everything about him. And I will miss him, too. I can only hope that he knew how much his readership meant to me. I think he did.