_^Around the time I turned forty, I finally got the family thing together. Newly hitched to a handsome, strapping, and utterly devoted man from upstate New York, I also married into his large extended Italian family. My small family was intact as well. Over the years, although we didn’t have children, Jim’s brothers and cousins married, progeny arrived, and our lives were filled with family-oriented activities. Following a lonely young adulthood, I was happy to settle into this new life. 

Life, however, had different plans.

 My husband Jim was killed on 9/11. The particular circumstances of his death threw into stark relief the differences between his devoutly Catholic and very rooted family and me. I was certainly included in plans for the Mass in his hometown and was made aware of the headstone designed for the grave made ready for the remains that were eventually  identified. I was among them, those tightly knit clansmen, but somehow not of them. He went home to family and I stayed in place, adrift and alone.

My immediate family literally disappeared: one minute, a tangible unit; the next – poof – gone. My parents, already ailing, died one after the other. My sister, dealing with her own issues, raced back and forth to care for them and then settle the estate, inspiring not support but wrath from my brother, himself too caught up in his own professional problems to give anyone else a second thought.  

Notwithstanding I recognized that I hadn’t been devastated financially or physically, I was afraid. Loss is something most people experience in small doses doled out over the years, not all at once. I kept thinking: no husband, no family, no roots; no reason to be. Dangerous thoughts for dangerous times.

 But family is whatever you want it to be, as I slowly figured out. It’s the  9/11 widows with whom you shared a particular experience and recovery. It’s the old housemate who’s always been like a brother to you (he even looks like you!) whose wife had become one of  your closet friends.

It’s Jim’s family, with whom you’ve stayed in touch, especially his youngest brother whose young kids call you “Aunt”.

It's blood relatives too, like  the cousins in Oregon or the niece and nephews you follow through Facebook. It's the dog you adore and the sister with whom you share an unbreakable bond as well as an unspoken language. 

Then there are the families that have adopted you, heart and soul, and found for you a permanent place within their ranks that extends to the next generation. My older “brother” from Uruguay stayed with our family as a high school exchange student, called my parents “mom” and “dad” and still calls us his sisters. I am aunt to his beautiful daughters, one of whom, Gabriella, moved to New York, where I helped  her find a job. She met and married this past summer. The big wedding reception will be in Uruguay in December and we sisters are expected to be there – and we will be.

Finally, there is my dear friend/could-be niece, Alyson and her husband Eric. I call them "the kids"  as in: "I'm going to visit the kids this weekend." I gave Alyson her first job fifteen years ago. I saw her through her first, brief marriage to a man who had a gambling problem, her unfortunate involvement with a man who ended up both stalking and assaulting her and finally, just as her professional star took off, her marriage to an excellent and stalwart young man. I commiserated when she found out she couldn’t get pregnant and celebrated when she  and Erik decided to adopt a child from the Ukraine; I even wrote the recommendation letter. When they got accepted, I was as ecstatic as they were. And when I went to visit them last week just before they were to take the long flight to Kiev and the big step that would change their lives, we decided their new child would call me Nonna. Hey, whatever the kids decide is fine with me.