Monday, August 19, 2019

Losing Lynn

I worked for Jack and Lynn at the Workshop from 1982 to 1986, when my son was born. I would have come back, but Lynn told me to stay home and take care of my son. Plus, she couldn’t exactly fire the person who’d taken my place, I guess.

The thing about the Workshop, is that no one ever really leaves, although I think I was probably a little stickier than most, and stuck little pieces of me to the rest of the Kearneys, and a few McDonnells, as well.

Lynn and Jack created a magical family. I don’t know if they realize how magical, because all families have strife, and tragedy, and squabbles small or large and you can’t always see the magic from inside. But those of us outside it, even just outside it, wonder at it. From inside that magical circle, Jill tells me that she would worry that her mother worried about everything so much. And I saw a little bit of this, too, because Lynn was constantly worrying at me, but mostly, from outside the magic circle, Lynn’s worrying looked like righteous caretaking, and unshakeable loyalty and an almost pathological optimism. She enfolded me when my husband left, and again when my father died, and I know would have continued to do so no matter what.

After I stopped working for Lynn and Jack I like to say that I refused to let them go, but I think it was more the other way around: they folded me in to that magic circle and told the resident elves, fairies, gnomes, and other fey creatures, that this was a person who mattered, frankly in a way that my own birth family never did.

Every now and then I’d show up at Lynn’s behest at some family event, and there would be a cousin or a granddaughter or a spouse, or another like me, invited in, and you could see the thought: who in the world is this random person at our Thanksgiving. And by the end of the meal, the relentlessness of Lynn’s love would have brought them along:

Oh, I know who this is. This is family.