RELATIONAL CHEMISTRY

When it comes to human chemistry, I think of my mother and her sisters. Any gathering that combined them would inevitably give off a high voltage energy. It was the mixing that did it.
I wouldn’t say they were close. In reality they might go for months, maybe even years without making contact. I can’t say they were similar in characteristics beyond appearance, though each was most likely the bookkeeper in her own world. It is certain that their choice of husbands emphasized what must have been genuine differences between them. I don’t even know if the sisters had much in common. There were five of them originally. One of them I did not know because she died when I was a child. Of the remaining four, two of them were farmers, one ran a thriving hardware business. The other was a justice of the peace. I never knew about it if they ever sought one another in search of advice.
So what was it that generated the chemistry? It wasn’t the past that brought them together. They rarely, if ever, reminisced about the old days. It probably wasn’t mutual agreement on current issues. Stubborn, strong-willed and boisterous by nature, it would have been plausible for them to burst into raucous argument.
We know, through observation, that chemistry happens. But we don’t usually know what actually causes it. The nature of elements remains a secret of the universe. Different and determined though the sisters were, they did not argue when they got together. Their gatherings were invariably loud and hilarious. They would pass the time in lengthy description of whatever was interesting to them at present, wich might be anything at all, what you could get at $1.49 day, or the process by which a prospective bride chose the style of her wedding cake. Smart women without much formal education, they shared an affinity for detail in any project that captured their attention. The longer they were together, the funnier they got. As a child, as an adult with children of my own, I was drawn to accept invitations to any event that would bring them together. There were weddings and funerals and birthday parties and baptisms. There was a family reunion with dogs and grandchildren and fireworks and enough food for an army.
One other characteristic they definitely shared. Their health was fragile, an odd thing for women so robust in other ways. Of five who grew to adulthood, to motherhood, not one made it to the average lifespan of Canadian women. Oldest of the pack, my mother was the last to go, and though my sides still ache recalling how their gatherings convulsed me into laughter, my heart breaks with the memory of hearing my mother sob, “All my sisters are gone!”
It is this confusion of joy and sadness, the intimate experience of a unique and irreplaceable chemistry that comes to my mind when strangers call to inquire if I do grief counselling. And though I still hear myself asking, “Were you close to the one you lost?” I hesitate to interpret too much from the answer, knowing how the chemistry can be more complicated than that.