"Queer as Faith"
by Nathan Gunter

Queer as Faith is a weekly column by Nathan Gunter.  Unconventional and thought-provoking, Nathan writes as a gay Christian struggling to live authentically in the real world.

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Week 35:
Advent, Week 4: The Birthing Ward, The Waiting Room, and the Funeral Home (an epilogue)

I seem to remember that when I was growing up, my mom’s side of the family always had all this delicious drama, like a high liturgy that was played out at every holiday. Old resentments and comments under the breath would cross a room like stones, and often you’d find someone emerging from a bathroom, red-faced, dabbing at tears or reapplying makeup. I can remember many occasions when someone stomped out during a Christmas, a Thanksgiving, or an Easter, exclaiming, “I will never come back here again.”

The next holiday, everyone would show up, and it would all play out again. As a child, I watched from any place I could find to hide, attracted and attentive to all the adult comings and goings, but also terrified that someday, someone would really Let Them All Have It, and then where would we be? We’d be that weird black sheep, the people who never show up for holidays and get talked about behind their backs. We’d be The Family Without A Family, and who wants to approve their loans or come over to their house for sleepovers?

I did not find out until I was in my teens that my mother’s parents had been the keepers of an embattled home, that they had fought, often violently, with one another, and later, with their children. I did not know all the subtle ways my grandparents had found to demean their kids, and especially their youngest daughter, who ended up giving birth to me. I didn’t know, watching the stage play unfold as a child, that my grandfather had left for months at a time, or that my mom shared a room – and a bed – with her two sisters while they all grew up in my grandparents’ 1000 square-foot house.

When I found this out, it was like a veil had lifted. I began to see my family’s interactions in a new light. When I was a child, people in my family fought. We gathered, we ate, and we waged a subtle, underground war. There was little, if any, outright fighting or open resentments. Instead, there were factions, and back-biting, and sometimes, if you really wanted to protest having been thrown into this awful clan, you did the most subversive and telling thing there was: you didn’t show up at all.

The drama was higher when I was young. We are a family that has been struggling toward equilibrium for decades. Possibly centuries. It is possible that we have sin that was inherited from the Germans, the Irish, the Welsh, and the Cherokees that goes back to the dawn of mankind. It is possible, and likely, that every generation of my family has been trying as hard as they can to keep everyone okay, and that this has always made them tired, and resentful.

I have an old picture we took as an extended family one Easter when I was six or seven. In it, the sun is shining very bright, and we are squinting into it, like we’d just been awoken and were herded outside at six in the morning. The children are smiling because they just don’t know any better. We were unaware of everything that had happened, and everything that would, because our parents really thought they were doing us a favor by protecting us from it.

This summer, we gathered again in my mother’s backyard, and we took another picture. We were celebrating the family birthdays that happen in late summer, and it seemed that, for once, everyone had decided, in an act of true revolution, to truly show up. The gathering was easy, and informal. The gossip was trotted out in the open for us all to see. No one, for once, pretended not to be broken. In the picture taken that day, we all look more tired, but we are smiling, and holding on to one another, like people on a lifeboat.

So what happened? To tell you the truth, I’m not sure. I think that, twenty years ago, we were all still holding out hope that we wouldn’t get found out. All those secrets with which we were bursting were still festering under the surface. We were still trying to make polite conversation and pretend to be Okay. Now, we don’t pretend.

When I was twelve, my cousin Darin was in a horrible car accident that left him in a coma. He was in intensive care for over a year, and our family gathered every weekend in the Intensive Care waiting room. This is a different kind of place than the waiting rooms in any other part of the hospital, because in the other parts of the hospital, you always know what you’re waiting for. A diagnosis. The surgery to be over. To find out the baby’s a girl. There’s always some perceived end.

With a coma patient, it’s like Purgatory. You are just waiting. Darin lay there, sometimes his eyes were open and it was like he was waiting for you to figure out the answer to a riddle. A lot of times his mother, my aunt Peggy, cried, and I became frustrated and sad in my powerlessness. My grandparents, cousins, aunts, and uncles all spent weekends in the Intensive Care ward, just waiting some news, some development, good or bad. I would work on my stories. Others would read.

After almost a year and a half, Darin was released into home care, but he died in his sleep shortly after that. At the same time his younger sister, my favorite cousin Emily, found out she was pregnant. She was 18, and unmarried. Well.

When Darin died, it sent us all into a kind of a tailspin. In the face of death, there is absolutely no point in pretending to be Okay, so we kind of gave up sucking in our collective gut and sat around in all our emotional fatness for the world to see. Sometimes, as a family, we don’t like each other, or even know each other. When we buried my cousin, however, we clung together like life. We knitted a big parachute for my aunt and uncle to fall into, and we held it up for dear life.

Peggy came and stayed with us for several weeks after Darin’s funeral. She was tired, and strung out after all those months of sitting in the hospital and just waiting. She and I would cook meals, and do the shopping, and fold laundry, and I, in my very 14-year-old head, had no idea what to say, ever. One of the worst feelings in the world is when someone I love is hurt, or afraid, and crying, and I can do nothing but stand there.

Six months after Darin’s death, his sister, Emily, gave birth to her son. I remember being awoken at four in the morning and driving three hours with my mother to Durant, Oklahoma, where, once again, my family was gathered together in one place. We cheered Emily on, and brought her ice, and when little Alec Keith Gray came into the world, there were 10 people in the room to welcome him. He’s ten and a half years old now, and I am absolutely supposed to tell you that he called me to get some help on his homework, and now he understands fractions.

He saved his grandmother, in the most important way one person can save another: he gave her a new reason to get up every morning. He was hope, embodied. He has been showered with love, and presents, and might actually be the most photographed child on the planet. When he was born he had a zit, and he was bright purple, and I was crying so hard I could barely see. But I was there; we all were. We had showed up, and we threw him his very first birthday party.

This is how I learned that most of the time, being in a family just involves showing up. For holidays, even if you don’t really want to, you make your green bean casserole or your cheesecake, you get in the car, and you show up, because you are bound to these people, whether or not that’s something you would have chosen for yourself. I certainly would not have chosen to be related to these people. I’d much rather have the nice store-window family from Neiman Marcus. What I got instead is my K-Mart Blue Special family, and I am madly in love with them.

This last Christmas, we gathered once more in a funeral home, because my uncle Jim owns a chain of them. It got me thinking about family, and sin, and the Law of Showing Up. You see, the world tells us that if we cannot get over our problems – or at least, pretend that we’ve gotten over them – that we shouldn’t even bother showing up unless we can act decently ashamed. This is the bond that families make; they know you as well as anyone, because by some rite of blood you are not able to hide your problems from them. You cannot keep your family for long in the great palace lie that you are Fine and everything is Normal. Eventually, you will have to come running to them for help, and eventually, you will get gossiped about.

So my family does the most revolutionary thing it can: we show up. And when we gathered together in the funeral home to exchange gifts and eat barbecued shrimp, I was watching all of us together and thinking about the things I know about each of these people. I think about all the secrets I keep, and all of mine that are kept. I think about how much I am worried about, and cared for, and prayed for behind the scenes. I think about all the sin that exists just in our one little clan alone, and it seemed suddenly appropriate to be gathered in a place that earns money off of death.

Because, well, I am a writer and my family told me this Christmas that it is okay for me to write about them, provided I take us all on a vacation sometime after I fall into Michiko Kakutani’s good graces or become Alfonso Cuaron’s new best friend. My aunt Janet said we have all kinds of interesting stories to tell, and it would be a shame to keep them to ourselves.

Someday, I will have a family. I will have children who occasionally think of clocking me across the head with my own shoes, and I will have a husband who loves me enough to tell me what a jerk I can be. My family and his family will meet, and there will be a bit of high drama here and there, but it will all be too late and we’ll find our families falling madly in love with each other just like we did. All this drama, and all this love, and all these secrets will continue to crackle in the air, long after I am old, and longer still after I am dead.

Time will march on. The voices will be quieted. The drama will be forgotten. The green bean casserole will start to smell really bad in the fridge. The love will be passed on.

So, from my family to yours, and ours, and the whole tribe of us who are keeping secrets, and Showing Up, and starting a revolution by caring for the people who make us the most crazy and insecure, a Happy New Year.

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