Alli

My amazing, strong, beautiful cousin died yesterday.

Jul 04, 2024

I figured I’d write about the Fourth of July today, maybe add something incisive to the punditocracy about aging presidential candidates, debates, and/or freedom.

But as most everyone knows, when death comes to a family, it doesn’t matter what day it is — holiday or not — nor does it matter what wars are happening, what social media memes are blowing up, or how your favorite sports teams is faring.

Death relativizes everything.

And my cousin, Alli, died yesterday.

Alli was 41, and she was a force.

She leaves behind her husband, Pat, whom she met at Middlebury College, and her kids, Charlie and June; also her parents, Priscilla and Steve, her sister, Angie, and a bunch more family and friends.

There is much I could write in tribute to Alli, but I’m going to save most of that for her funeral. Instead, I’m going to use this space to reflect on how death reshapes a family.

When I was about 10 years old, my family lived on Andover Road in Edina, the first house my parents bought as newlyweds. I have a vivid memory of sitting on the stairs to the basement and having my baby cousin, Craig, put into my arms. I’m sure that I remember that so well because Craig died shortly thereafter — just six weeks old, of sudden infant death syndrome. I also remember the day he died — where I was, what I heard, my dad leading us in prayer (not something my dad often did).

Sometime within the next year or so, I was babysitting my brothers when my aunt and uncle pulled up to the house and told us to get in their car. They drove us a few blocks to Aspasia Circle, where our parents were standing in the driveway of the house they’d just purchased, a house in which each of us boys would have our own bedroom. As the oldest, I got first choice: I could either take the biggest bedroom or get the double bed. I chose the larger room.

Within a couple years, another house on Aspasia Circle came on the market, and my aunt and uncle bought it and moved in. Their family grew. So my cousins — Amy, Angie, and Alli — were just three houses down from us. Further cementing the bond, after our grandfather died in 1987, our two families became joint owners of the lake property in Crow Wing County.

All that to say, our cousins down the block were more like little sisters.

My cousin, Amy, died at age 43 in February, 2018. My father died the same month.

And now Alli.

Like a potter’s hands on wet clay, death has reshaped our family.

And like still-malleable clay, those of us who survive seem to fill in the crevices and breaches left by the deceased. I thought of this on Monday, as I was repairing a water heater in the crawl space underneath the cabin. Dressed in “work clothes,” as my father was every morning at the cabin — he’d switch to shorts and a short-sleeved, button-down shirt sometime in the mid-afternoon, usually after jumping in the lake to bathe — I futzed and finagled until I figured out which tools to use and how to get the thing working again. Just what my dad would have done.

Each of his three sons have molded ourselves into aspects of the family that he used to fill. Just as, in the wake of Amy’s death, her partner and parents and sisters filled the empty spaces she left, especially in parenting her son.

And now we’ll have to do it again — to remake our family along the contours of another emptiness, to love Pat and Charlie and June and carry them in their grief and loss. We’ll never be the sisters that Angie had, nor the children of Steve and Priscilla, but we’ll do our best to fill those unfilled spaces with love. Someone will have to become Alli’s surrogate for fighting clutter on the bookshelves at the cabin, a substitute for her advocacy of sustainable packaging, fellow fans of soccer and Brandi Carlisle.

I don’t know all of the new shapes that our family will take in the wake of Alli’s death, but we’ve done it before, and we can do it again.

Pray for us. And thanks for reading.

Tony’s Field Notes

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