Aunt Della

On the night of Kyle's accident, it took them awhile to track my parents down. He was alone at the hospital as they wheeled him in and hooked him up and tried for some sign of brain activity. They searched his cell phone for family members, but for some reason he'd entered my parents into his phone by name, not by label, and it took them awhile to get my dad on the line. It took him awhile to get my mom on the line. By the time both my parents had been told about these, their new lives, it was 11:30 at night and the airports were closed. They were going to have to drive. They were going to have to leave my brother alone for the six hours it would take to get to Palo Alto.

So my mom called Aunt Della.

Aunt Della is not really my aunt. She's my mother's best friend, the mother of my best friend, and she's known me my entire life. Before the divorces, our mothers and fathers and Katie B and me and our band of brothers would have late afternoon Los Angeles barbeques. After the divorces, we did Christmases and Thanksgivings. We visited each other at hospitals. We knew the sound of each other's cars, the smell of each other's linens. My point is that family is about blood, but it is also about choice, about circumstance, about the strange spikes of fate a more religious person might chalk up to God.

I've taken Aunt Della for granted most of my life. She was just a mom, after all. Another disciplinarian, another set of eyes, another maker of rules and bedtimes and nutritious meals. For years I thought of her like I did a neighbor, or a babysitter, or any other familiar adult. I didn't realize she was family - not really, not concretely - until my brother died.

Aunt Della was home when my mom called. She was on her way to bed, she had work in the morning, but she picked up the phone. I don't know how my mom told her. It must've been hard to understand through the sobbing. When I try to imagine this, my mother choking in a dark car, Aunt Della sitting up in bed, trying to get her friend to slow down, to speak clearly, my mind jumps instead to when I was ten years old and crying on the phone to Katie B, trying to get out that my parents were separating while she asked over and over, her voice rising in fear, "Mir, what is it? What is it, Mir?"

But that doesn't matter. What matters is that Aunt Della hung up the phone, dressed and drove to Palo Alto, where she sat holding my brother's hand and listening to his tubes breathe while my parents sputtered up California, nothing but black farms and headlights and my number tried over and over, because I didn't know yet.

The coincidence of this is staggering. At least to me. For our whole lives, Katie B and I lived in LA. Even after we left for school, our parents stayed in or near the city. But then, last year, Aunt Della remarried and moved to Berkeley. It seemed sad at the time. Katie and her brothers would now be going upstate in December, and Kyle and I would be going to LA. No more shared holidays. No more Christmas breaks spent riding around our hometown, talking about people we used to know.

But then my brother fell, the airports closed, and suddenly my mom realized we knew someone who could go to Kyle, who could sit with him and tell him that he wasn't alone. Who my mom could call over and over as they inched upstate. And not just anyone. Family.