A family grows yet forever stays the same

The Boston Herald

September 15, 1999

Beverly Beckham

For years our two families went to the same church. The Thomas pew was down front on the right and ours was in the row behind them. They filled an entire pew because even 30 years ago there were a lot of them.

I can picture them as they were: George and Barbara, the parents, old to me then, but not old to me now, sitting in their place at the end of the pew. Caryn, their eldest, was beside them. Then came Cheryl, Susan, George and Pam.

The kids all married and had kids of their own, not overnight, of course. It was a gradual thing, the building of a family, the filling up of the pews.

Caryn's baby Michele was the first to squirm out of Aunt Cheryl's arms and be passed among the aunts and down the row to George and Barbara, who were now and forever Nana and Papa. Michele was the first to toddle up the center aisle to the altar, too, maybe not every Sunday, but for a lot of Sundays. For years it was like this. All the Thomases always there, a child being passed among them like a wonder ball, ending up in Nana's arms, then Papa's, then in a flash of little legs pumping, bolting down the aisle and on to the altar.

These children are grown up now. The oldest have babies. The clan keeps multiplying.

They're not in church every Sunday anymore. A few still go regularly, but most live too far away.

Last week, Michele returned to have her youngest son baptized. She and her husband Rich flew from Florida with their two boys, and there they were on Sunday morning, in church, down front on the right, right where they belong. The Thomases, all with a bunch of other names now but still Thomases, filled four, maybe five pews this time, so many generations of them. And there was Nana, still at the end of a pew.

We took our usual place behind them and it was as if no time had passed - yet so much had.

George's wife, Patty, said it. Patty with her youngest son beside her, a young man so much like his father that he could be his clone, same hair, eyes, build, stance. When did he grow up? Patty turned to me and whispered: "We used to be the ones with the babies. Where did all the time go?"

It went into making this - this huge, wonderful, sprawling, amazing family.

There they were together, not just side by side, but bound in a way that people who aren't family can never be bound. There they were gathered together for each other. There were people missing, Papa most notably. There was a space next to Nana where he should have been. But there was no hole in this family, no irreparable tear because the family pulled together and was knit by loss, tightened, not pulled apart by tragedy.

Death, illness, disappointment, personal disasters that no one outside a family ever knows about, families somehow survive these things.

Members of the Thomas clan, with their separate, distant, very disparate lives at their core, love one another. This is their strength. You see it in the way they are with their children. The wonder ball goes round and round. This time it's little Mikaela being passed from aunt to grandmother to great-aunt to great-grandmother, finally escaping and racing up the aisle and on to the altar.

But then coming back. This is their secret. This is what binds them. They always come back.