My Cousin Tom

I was maybe fourteen when my cousin Tom and a friend rode their motorcycles from their home in New Jersey to Florida. They spent the night with us at our house in Yorktown, Virginia. I can still picture the bikes. Choppers. Front wheels stretched way out on long forks. Ape hanger handlebars. They were the coolest motorcycles I had ever seen in real life. And my cousin was riding one of them on what felt like an endless road trip.

Decades later, after owning several motorcycles myself, I realized what an incredible feat that really was. Riding a hardtail motorcycle more than a thousand miles feels like something only a young man with an enormous appetite for life would even attempt.

I was in my sixties before I really got to know my cousin and hear him tell that story himself. It only made me admire him more. The older I got, the more I realized what kind of spirit it took to move through life that way.

Tom died yesterday. He had just turned seventy-seven, and his love of life seemed to stay with him until the very end.

What I will remember most about Tom, besides his love of life, is what a great storyteller he was.

Every time I saw him, Tom told stories about my father, his Uncle Jerry. Stories I had never heard before. Stories about my brother Mike too. Small moments. Funny moments. Parts of their lives that might have disappeared if nobody had carried them forward.

Just sitting with Tom brought back so many memories of my parents and my brother. I could feel them with me again in a way I hadn’t in years. To him, they were probably just good memories and funny stories. To me, they were everything.

Somewhere along the way, without me fully realizing it, my cousin had become a living connection to my own family.

My parents had two sons, Mike and me. My father had one brother, who was killed in World War II at nineteen. My mother came from a much larger family, but for reasons I still struggle to fully explain, I spent much of my adult life disconnected from many of them.

At the time, I don’t think I fully understood what that distance meant. I think I simply assumed there would always be more time. But after the loss of my parents, and eventually my brother, I began to understand the loneliness hidden inside that isolation. So much family history suddenly felt gone. So many stories, memories, and connections I had never taken the time to know.

Or at least I thought they were.

It wasn’t until after the loss of my parents that I really found my way to my cousins Patti, Judy, Jackie, and Tom, along with the large extended family that came with them. And through all of them, I found the presence of my parents again in a way I never expected.

To see someone through the eyes of another is to see something you may never have seen otherwise.

What began as reconnecting with a cousin slowly became something much deeper. Sitting with Tom, listening to him laugh and tell stories about my father and my brother, often felt less like visiting extended family and more like finding my way back to a part of myself I thought was gone.

People do that for each other.

Without ever announcing it, they carry parts of us into their own lives. Stories. Memories. Fragments of laughter and personality that somehow survive long after a life ends. Memories we thought were gone until someone unexpectedly brings them back to life across a dinner table or a phone call.

Tom carried my father and brother forward for me in a way I’m not sure he ever fully understood. It meant everything to me. I don’t think he could have given me a greater gift. I wish I had taken the time to tell him just how much that meant to me.

Thank you, Tom. For the stories. For the laughter. For helping me find parts of the people I loved that I thought were gone.

Now, like so many others who loved you, I find myself carrying you into my future. I only hope I can honor you as well as you honored the people I loved so dearly.