As a long-time culture of one, “family” is an elusive concept, the identity one inherits at birth, so (apparently) easily transcended but so impossible to identify one never knows how much of who one’s self has been predetermined by particular jigsaw puzzle pieces that might come from any of a number of unknown people.
With a child, a lot of talking is done about who the child resembles. A parent can buy into that, and expect one’s child to take after himself, although, to observe the child, the idea that my son at the age of three and myself at the age of three would be at all similar seems unlikely.
To extrapolate back from adulthood to childhood, and vice versa, can’t be done.
Until recently, the idea that I am somehow a combination of my parents never occurred to me. That I would be much like my three brothers also seems way overly simplistic. Although how often I’ve wondered at myself, how I ever came to be this combination of characteristics, if maybe this predilection for implosion comes from my mother and my fondness from music from my father, my fondness for drink from my father, my fondness for literature from my mother.
That family is a great special thing has never been an experience of mine, and the idea that I should prize the companionship of family among any other group of people rings hollow, although very nice it is to be acquainted with companions, say, people from school, people at work, and describe them as being like family in a positive way.
The commonality of people seems the most telling thing of all. Aboard a bus, on the street, in traffic, I’m struck by how people can be both so individual and anonymous. I walk past someone and think how sad that I know nothing about him or her, although somewhere in the world, there might be a mother, father, son, daughter, long-lost friend, who would give anything to trade places with me so they could be close to this person whose existence gives his life its greatest meaning.
Maybe in Heaven people will have a type of transparence, so everyone knows everybody else, and one is always among people who have the truest appreciation of each other, with no distinctions of family, race, gender, any of the attributes we falsely identity with in this life. In Heaven, we’ll have our humanity, as we have it in this life, and to recognize that common humanity in everyone is to be a member of this one big family.