A New Year's Word on Family

Before I ring in the New Year, I thought I'd muse on what makes things all worthwhile: family.

However, as I have learned in the course of things, family is not just those people that are blood related to you, but those who you yourself take into your heart. Your family is a created thing, fired in your own heart, and held with love. Love makes it, keeps it, and cherishes it, and once that exists, a little matter of blood relations is completely incidental.

At the moment part of my blood related family are in the middle of a bitter fight, which is being carried out with frosty intensity much in the same way that the Cold War mustered along, without weapons fire, but filled with years of bitterness on all sides. In the midst of this, I have come to cherish more and more my created family, who have often stepped in, in the stead of my related family.

Aunt T was part of this created family, and she could not have been more loved if she had been related by blood to all of us. In fact, in some cases, she was more family than family was. She was always ready to step in and help if any of us needed anything, and offered nothing but kindness to all who knew her. I still half pick up the phone to call her, because there are things I think of to share with her. I don't know that everyone would understand what would bring together a diverse group of people unrelated to each other, to all come and stand around a hospital bed in the middle of the night, and to fill up a hospital ICU to cry together, and to take care of each other. That there is love alone, often unexpressed, but beating quickly and quietly beneath the surface, ready to spring to action for crisis, need or joy, ready to act for one another. That there, is what family is in my mind. Whether these family are related or not is irrelevant, so long as there is love between them.

Perhaps it is a little long winded of me to go on like this, but it has forcibly been brought home to me, as I have thought about who would come for me if I needed it, and also, who I would think to ask. I've certainly got my own cavalcade of friends who are family, who have been there in the rotten times as well as the good ones. These are the people who you feel comfortable with no matter how goofy you may be (and believe me, I can do goofy). And the people who just spending time with them in an empty room, and it will be fun to do.

So, as the new year emerges, I'd like to say, Cheers to Family in all forms, and to those of you reading, most of whom are family, Thank-you for all that you are.