December 5, 2011

• 1 of 17

  My oldest cousin on my dad's side passed away last week after a long illness. He was a professor of neuroscience. He is survived by his father, two siblings, his wife, and his daughter. Those are the kinds of facts that you read in obituaries, and I always find the lack of personal detail to make them even more heartbreaking. Can a person's entire life really be summed up in a few terse words about what relatives they had and what they did for a living?

  This is only the second funeral I'll have been to in my life. I'm ashamed to admit it. I probably should have gone to a couple of others, but the idea of going to them always sends me into deep and paralyzing anxiety. I'll say the wrong thing. I'll do the wrong thing. I'll cry too much and make things harder on the people I'm there to support. I won't cry enough and I'll offend them. I'll wear something wrong and my mom will get mad at me. I'll have to admit that the person is really gone, but I won't get any sense of closure. I'll get even more angry about how unfair life can be, and wonder why this had to happen.

  I'll never say any of this at the funeral, it's just my inner rambling monologue, but this is what I'm thinking, as I look ahead to Friday, when we'll all gather around and try to make some sense out of something that just doesn't make sense. 

  My cousin was the oldest of three siblings, and the oldest of seventeen cousins on my father's side. Not only that, but he was the eldest son of the eldest son, which is something special in Chinese families. He was over ten years older than I am, and almost 20 years older than our youngest cousin. A lot of us teasingly called him "Uncle," but it wasn't just because of the age difference. He was wise beyond his years, and wise beyond the years of almost anyone else on this planet. Our family has been lucky to get some pretty good genes in the brains department (it appears we paid for them mostly with the genes for athletic ability). Our parents all have PhDs, and we cousins have a mix of degrees that jumble together into alphabet soup.

  But this cousin, even among such cousins, was special. His IQ was somewhere in the 220s. He started college at Johns Hopkins when he was twelve years old. He finished early. He got a Neuro PhD from CalTech before he could legally drink. He was the smartest person I have ever known. Most of my friends have never met him, but they know about him, because he's one of those people that you just can't resist telling people about. Whenever there is a "I know this really smart guy" conversation, I pretty much know I'm going to win, unless someone happens to be friends with Stephen Hawking.

  Despite being so superhuman-ly intelligent, he wanted to do all the things that we normal people do. He sang silly songs at family reunions, and played games and rough-housed with the rest of us, even though we probably bored him. He tried to explain his research to us younger cousins, using analogies to Big Macs and French fries. He worked in Germany for a while, and brought back Kinder eggs, little plastic toys tucked inside little green plastic eggs, nested inside chocolate eggs, and wrapped in foil. He played Ultimate Frisbee and went on hikes. He fell madly in love with another brain scientist, and life seemed to have finally caught up to my genius cousin, who had spent so many years so far ahead of everyone else.

  Then cancer came, and it came as a shock. The diagnosis was grim, and I wondered how any disease would dare to touch someone so young, so special, so gifted, so certain to make a difference. My parents worried that his new fiancee would decide not to marry him and break his heart, and then they worried that she would decide to marry him and get her own heart broken, instead. She married him, and they battled their way through treatment. They had a daughter, and he decided that his ultimate dream would be to see her start kindergarten, even though all of the statistics were against him. Never one to simply perform according to average or even above-average levels, he went through treatment after treatment, countless setbacks and hopes, and saw his daughter past kindergarten and through several years of elementary school. (It gives things a vertiginous kind of perspective, doesn't it, that someone who had reached such great heights had but one burning desire, and that desire was to do something that the rest of us do every day, with almost no effort -- to live.) 

  At some point, I think that I started accepting his over-achievement as a patient in the same way I had always accepted his genius mind. That's just how he was, and that's how he always would be. Every time he took a turn for the worse, I would assume that soon, he would take a turn for the better, because that's what he had been doing for over ten years.

  I can't imagine how hard his fight must have been, how much pain he suffered, how it must have felt like to drag a one or two year battle out over twelve years, how heartbreaking it must have been to watch his wife and daughter and wonder how many days they had left together, and how the years would treat them after he was gone. I wonder if he managed to pack more life into his years than a normal person would be able to, given his incredible capabilities, and if so, if that would help to make up for the fact that he was short-changed in terms of actual years. Even if it does make up for it (which I think it probably doesn't), it seems like the rest of us around him are still missing out.

  I looked at the shared spreadsheet where we're all filling in our flight and hotel information, and so far, it looks like 29 of our family are flying in. In the old days, whenever all of the family got together, our parents would line all of the cousins up in age order, oldest to youngest, and take pictures. You can track the passage of time based on the number of cousins in existence, the size of the glasses we wore, the perms and bowl cuts, the gap-toothed grins of the young kids, the reluctant smiles of the teenagers, but it was always a big group, and the line was always led by cousin #1, and we'll never be able to take a picture like that again.

  RIP, CB. Maybe we're each only allowed to have a certain number of intelligent thoughts in our lifetimes, and you used yours up faster than the rest of us. We'll miss you forever.

  • 10:33 pm
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