Catching Up - My Cousin Mike Dies 4/272010

 I got a pass yesterday to see my lawyer. I also got a letter from my Dad. Dad shares everyone's questions: if you were having trouble, why keep your mouth shut? I do not think he has read the letter I sent him. He was thoroughly decent. Last night, I prayed that I might die and so stop all the pan I am causing. I remain among the living today. What this means to the theory that there is a purpose being impressed on my life, I do not know.

Tonight, my oldest sister informs me that my cousin Mike died. When was the last time I saw him? 1991? No, I do not think so. Maybe '81 or '82? Jailbird, alcoholic, biker, carnie. He and his brother were the closet things I had to big brothers. I split my eyebrow open in '66 chasing them. The only time I was in Lum's was with Mike (this was on Shortridge across from the Eastgate Mall. Both Lums and the Mall are long gone. Lums had hot dogs steamed in beer.) My first memory of Mike goes back to 1965 when we arrived in Pittsfield, MA - Aunt Mary Ellen had his arm pinned up behind his back. Mike got me smoking Old Golds and drinking Beck's Dark back in '81. Mike, who studied trombone with Dave Brubeck, who painted well, but did wood working even better. A hale and well meet fellow obsessed with finding his natural parents, while his adoptive parents tried fitting him into a mold suitable for a son of a GE executive. My great-aunt always said my mother's sister tried too hard to fit him into a mold. He had a serious injury, 20 -25 years ago, and he declined horribly. The last time I spoke with him, sometime in 2001, he sounded like a ghost of himself - the voice sounded worn down by more than age, the effort at camaraderie sounding truly forced for the first time. I wonder what he would make of the ruin of my life. Would he be thinking, as we thought of him: how could you ruin your talents this way?

In some ways, Mike ought not have taken the interest in me that he did - I was a bookish, shy, angry child - and he was the natural athlete, the extrovert. His brother Paul ought to have been the more natural fit - maybe our aggressive ambitions drove us apart - but the older he became, the more pompous became Paul. Mike was never pompous. He could take all the oxygen out of the room. Perhaps that is why Paul became bitter as he got older - all the responsibility fell on him without the same amount of affection. Hard to tell from geographic and temporal distances.  Farewell and God Bless, Michael Finholt. All of 59 years.

sch

[I still do not know what killed Mike. His brother now lives in Kokomo, unhealthily, and I have not seen him. I suspect this is the closest he ever had to an obituary, let alone a eulogy. sch 10/9/22.]