His eyes evoked a keen sadness. It wasn’t the first loss this family had endured. But it may be one of the hardest. This dysfunctional family had to come together to bury a mother and wife. She was the one who organized and cooked for weekly family dinners, forced everyone to attend the countless baseball games or school plays. After she was gone, slowly brother stopped calling sister, father became an alcoholic, this was the end of this family. The chaos of the this family had an essence of beauty in the sense that you couldn’t manufacture a more defective family.

My father, at the age of 16 buried his mother. He lost his person. Even though just one person died, the strong family bonds died with her. Just four years later, my dad endured another loss, of the person who filled the hole his mother left behind, his sister. She meant so much to him that he wanted to keep her memory alive by naming me, his first daughter Kathleen.  By this point, his father was a wreck and died just six months after my Aunt Kathleen. The loss of his father was more symbolic than anything. Tears streamed down my father's face while at the funeral, sad to loss a father but not terribly sad about the man that left. This family was destroyed like a house after a tornado. No one knew where to start to fix any damage so they didn’t.