Keening of the banshee

"At least he went peacefully," my cousin Jeanie said to me and my brothers. Her words were fresh with the grief she carried at the loss of her younger and only brother Tim earlier this week. Tim had always been the troubled child, with a history of aimlessness. About 6 years ago, his father, whom he idolized, died. Leukemia. Tim was so devastated he couldn't attend his dad's wake or funeral. He moved to Florida to sort things out. One of his friends introduced him to Doug, a 59-year-old man with Down syndrome. Tim and Doug hit it off, and Tim became Doug's caretaker. By all appearances Tim had his life together. In his spare time he fished and tried to lead an uncomplicated life.

Late last week some friends of Tim's invited him up to Pennsylvania to take a break. Tim went. One evening his friends went out to dinner and asked Tim to come. He wasn't feeling well, he said, so he stayed behind and watched television in the recliner. When his friends returned, they found Tim asleep in the recliner. Only he wasn't asleep. He was dead. He was 36.

Tonight my brothers, Liam and Brian, and I drove out to Deer Park to attend Tim's wake. We were still recovering from our aunt's near-death experience last week.

"Kim said she's giving her sister health care proxy," Brian said.

"How come?" I asked.

"She doesn't want me making life-or-death decisions about her. She said she couldn't believe I didn't rush to the hospital when Mommy told me Aunt Eileen was on a respirator. She said it doesn't get any more serious than that. I told her, she's got kids, and she's a strong woman."

"That's a little drastic," I said to Brian. "The health care proxy thing."

"To everyone else we're cold fish," Liam said, and we all laughed, knowing how untrue that was. The O'Leary boys are a mix of stoicism and sentimentality. At our mother's 65th birthday party a few years ago we could barely get through the tributes we gave her in front of the 80 or so partygoers we were sobbing so much.

Each of us is partnered with people whose cultures handle crisis very differently from us. Brian's wife is Italian-American, and her family is incredibly close, so close that four generations of Kim's family live within three houses of one another. Our family could never do something like that. It has nothing to do with love; it's a matter of privacy and respect.

"Kim said that if that were her aunt she would have dropped everything and gone," Brian said.

"Yeah, well that's how she feels about her aunts," I said. "She can't expect you to feel the same way."

"I have a hierarchy," Brian said. "Wife, son, mother, brothers. Everyone else follows."

"It's got nothing to do with whether you care about someone," Liam said.

"Exactly," I said. "When I did go, I got choked up seeing her there like that."

"Me too," said Brian. "I had to see for myself how she looked."

If we were less than histrionic over our aunt, whom we are very close to, we were even less so about our cousin Tim. Tim was the son of our Aunt Jean, our late father's younger sister. In his immediate family, Tim was the black sheep, much like our father. "Kind of ironic," I said. "In Daddy's family, everyone's a black sheep."

"Yeah," Brian said, "we're the Marilyns of the family."

We got to the funeral home an hour before the service ended. Crowds of people stood outside the building. It looked like an evacuation. As we made our way into the chapel where Tim's corpse lay, dozens of people streamed out. Inside the chapel, my brothers and I looked at each other in amazement. There were easily more than 100 people.

"Jesus!" I said. "I could never fill a room like this."

"I know I couldn't," said Liam.

But it was not for Tim, I realized, that the mourners came. It was for Aunt Jean, a petite woman who looks at least 10 years younger than her 64 years. She and my late uncle, Tim's father, were linchpins of the local chapter of the Ancient Order of Hibernians, an Irish-Catholic organization not unlike the Royal Order of Water Buffaloes. A large number of the mourners were AOH members. I spent many of my boyhood summers with Aunt Jean and Uncle Tim's family in Deer Park, back when it was farmland. I learned how to ride a bicycle there. I took part in a musical my cousins put on for the neighbors. I even attended AOH functions with my aunt's family.

Unlike us, they had fully embraced their Irish heritage. My cousins stepdanced each year at a feis (pronounced "fesh") in East Durham, NY. They listened to Irish folk artists like the Clancy Brothers and the Chieftains. On more than one occasion I remember hearing "Danny Boy" and seeing my aunt misty-eyed while singing the words to it. My brothers and I, on the other hand, were not raised with or fascinated by Irish culture. We made fun of its schlockiness and its relentless nostalgia.

What Aunt Jean lacks in stature she makes up for in magnanimity. Whenever I'd visit she'd run up to me, put her hands on my cheeks and stare straight into my eyes. "Look how handsome!" she'd shriek in a high-pitched voice. Then she'd hug me, her cheek next to mine, her bony frame wrapped tight around me. She was always upbeat, always putting the best face on things, always giving people the benefit of the doubt. She buried her husband 6 years ago; now she was burying her youngest child. Tonight she looked subdued but still radiant.

Tim's sister Jeanie seemed calmer than her sister Denice. Jeanie had spoken with Tim the week before, so she felt she'd had some closure with him. Denice hadn't spoken with him in much longer. Her eyes were bleary and her lip quivered when she talked about how happy Tim had been, but I knew she didn't really feel better. I hugged her, and that only made her cry more.

"Treasure your brothers," Denice said to me, and when I left her, I found I had tears in my eyes. They were tears not of grief, but of the recognition that life is fleeting. I think I know now how I would feel if I lost one of my brothers. People may think we're cold fish, but we know that the fear lurks, always, like a banshee before she keens.