On Family

 Last Friday morning, I took a flight down to Richmond, Virginia. My 92-year-old uncle, the last of that generation of MacPhersons, had passed away, and we were coming together to honor his life. This is still the time of Covid, of course, so it meant the service would be virtual.  Wearing a mask and doing extra handwashing was nothing, if it meant I could be with my people in grief. 

My people. My family. As a kid, I didn't spend time with extended family. My grandparents were dead and I only knew a couple of cousins vaguely. Later in life, I heard about families who had reunions.  Family reunions: groups of related people who met joyfully in groups, sometimes wearing matching t-shirts, sharing stories and playing games. It sounded as amazing to me as it was unimaginable. 

In my twenties, I began reaching out to these people I didn't really know. To my delight, what I discovered was that they were there. They were as happy to get to know me as I was them. It felt then -- and now -- miraculous.  When I heard stories from them, what I got was my history. I discovered that one of my grandmother's cared deeply about documenting family history and had made up beautiful photo albums, all lovingly annotated with dates and locations. My heart sang with joy. Someone else had taken the time to answer questions I had, years before I'd asked them -- someone who was connected to me, even though we'd never met. 

I have now taken on the role of family historian. To me, that means that I am happy to tell stories to the curious. To put the pieces together. Knowing more about the past is lovely but what my cousins and I have come to understand is that we don't live there. Our place is here, now.  

On Saturday night, my cousin and I sat on her couch, opening sympathy cards together.  The task seemed overwhelming, but she put them in a bag and suggested we take turns, drawing them out and reading them out loud to each other. We did that for hours. Some made us laugh; others made us cry. This is our now. 

Below is the eulogy I wrote for her Dad, my beloved uncle. 

Peace.

Rev David H MacPherson: A Life Well Lived ~ in Memoriam

The last time I spoke to my Uncle David was on the night of his birthday: September 23^rd, two days before he died. We talked for an hour and a half, which was a longer-than-usual phone call for us. I sang him Happy Birthday all the way through, and during the conversation, we laughed -- and we cried --which was pretty normal.  At one point, he told me he was ready to die. I knew this already because he’d been saying it for years. We’d heard it before.  This time, though, he told how good he felt knowing we were all okay and in good places in our lives. Dianna had a great job and was with Greg, who was a fantastic guy. Erin was flourishing in a career that she loved, and Ian was home from serving the country and had recently been using some of the tools he’d given him. These were some woodworking tools of my Grandfather’s and it gave Uncle David a deep joy to know that Ian was cherishing these tools that had been in his father’s hands and his own.

“I’m so grateful for everything I was given…where and when I grew up and with the family I had,” he said.

If you ever talked to Uncle David, you probably heard him say some of this, too.

He grew up on Charnwood Road in Somerville, Massachusetts, the youngest of the three MacPherson boys.  They lived in a two-family house that his uncle Carlton had built.  His father, Harold, was a master plumber who had served and gotten hit with mustard gas in France during the First World War and his mother, Doris, was the one who held down the home. I’m sorry I never got to know them.  Over the years, I heard stories from Uncle David, his brother Robert, and my Dad, Wally. I am one of the few people now who can accurately report that the MacPherson house in the 1930s and 40s was clearly a raucous place to be.  I heard all three of them tell me the same jokes that their father told them.  He was clearly a character. They had two cats – Pat and Mike – that they loved but also seemed to need to tease by walking them around on two legs. They each got their favorite dessert on their birthday – which for Uncle David was a maple-frosted cake. My Dad told me about antics that featured him and Uncle David -- both pranksters at heart – ganging all their youthful energy up on Robert, who was the straight man of the group.  They short-sheeted his bed, moved his things leading him to believe he’d lost them, and made excessive noise when he was trying to study.  This lasted as long as they could get away with it, which was usually about when their mother found out and then sound of her yelling “HAROLD!!!” could be heard down the block.  Interestingly enough, my grandfather, seemed to have taken the side of Uncle David and my Dad. They had their family dynamics set.

Uncle David’s childhood was pretty idyllic, by his account. They had Sunday dinners with the family after church. They listened to the Lone Ranger, Fibber McGee and Molly, and The Shadow on the radio.  They took trips to historic sites and they visited the family in Falmouth Mass, where they could all go target shooting.

It was also a life that was centered around the West Somerville Universalist Church. Every summer they went to Ferry Beach, the Universalist camp in Maine. It’s clear that so much of his grounding came from those days and those people. I was lucky enough to know one of them. Alice Harrison – Rev DOCTOR Alice Harrison – offered religious education for teenagers both at Ferry Beach and at her church in Lynn MA where she was their first female RE director. I got to know her when I moved to Boston and started attending First and Second Church. She was a force to be reckoned with, and she actively encouraged Universalist youth to consider ministry. The day I met her, I was speaking to the minister, introducing myself when she overheard me and came right up, excitedly telling me she knew my dad, my uncles, my grandparents and that she was so glad that my uncles had gone into ministry. 

His youth seems to have been one which was full of love and of being held. He was held by family and held by the church community.  And I think you can see how this translated into his life’s work.

In this last conversation, we talked – of course – about my late aunt, his beloved Dottie. They met in high school and as Uncle David said: “That was it. She was the one.” I went to Richmond for a visit in the 1980s and when I got back, told my Dad how amazingly affectionate they were, especially for a couple that had been together for so many years. He told me: “That’s how they’ve always been, since the minute he met her.” And so, it was.

Uncle David also told me a story about some nights when after visiting Dottie, he had missed the last streetcar and had to walk home. I‘d heard this from my Dad too. I’m not sure about Uncle Robert but I know for a fact that both my Dad and Uncle David on more than one occasion ended up walking MILES just to get home after spending a night out late, visiting their romances. But the detail I hadn’t heard until September 23^rd was that when entering the house, they sometimes discovered that their dad was asleep with the door to the bedroom open. This was tricky because, as they well knew, their dad slept with a gun under the bed. Apparently, they’d developed an art to --in limbo-style fashion—slink their way in, low…past their parents bedroom door.

After graduating high school, he went to college at Tufts, that famous Universalist School, conveniently: right up the road.  Tufts led to Crane Theological School which took him into his life in ministry.

When Uncle Robert died two years ago, in his eulogy I recounted not having seen much of my uncles when I was little, and how in my 20s, I decided to reach out.  At the time, I was considering a career in ministry and since my lineage was as a MacPherson – literally: son of a parson – it meant that it was in my family’s blood. I decided that I wanted to know these men as family and from then on, developed special bonds with them both.

Though I never got ordained, I feel as called as I ever was and as engaged in ministry as I ever wanted –and much of this is because of this man we’re saying goodbye to.  I am who I am because of my family, all my people. He and I saw so much of the world the same way and we spoke the same language.  He just got me.

When we last spoke, he told me that he had been thinking about sermons again and that he had three more sermons he wanted to write. “After all those years of ministry, I finally know what I should be saying,” he said. I laughed at this and told him to write them – that I would find a place for him to get out the word. When I’ve told people this story, they ask me if he told me what they were going to be about. He didn’t. We can guess -- but even if we don’t know the words, we know what would have behind them.

Some people leave bigger holes than others. He leaves behind a chasm. Thank you for loving me, Uncle David. I promise I will keep up the work of putting love in the world -- and creating heaven on earth.