April | 2017 | Figuring. Shit. Out.

Like most everyone else with a smartphone, I try to unglue myself from it periodically — mute the ringer, shut the whole thing off for a couple hours or maybe even leave the damned pernicious addictive isolating gizmo in the car for the day. When I revive or retrieve said DPAI gizmo after a sabbatical, I look down and inevitably find text messages. Many, many text messages. One day, in one thread alone, I found 148.

No. That wasn’t a typo. Yes. One thread, 148 messages. ONE HUNDRED AND FORTY-EIGHT. But it wasn’t just any thread. It was my extended Richardson family thread, and let me tell you, those babies are EPIC, full of personality and opinion and politics and joshing and photos and memes and videos and articles and emojis and all sorts of crack-me-up exchanges, with room for occasional stumbles and fumbles that resolve with love and humor. We talk about everything, and by everything I mean EVERY LAST THING, including things not normally discussed at length in family iPhone threads. Recently, the conversation veered from the smoke emitting from someone’s aged Civic to the banana pudding at a bakery on the Upper West Side to disco roller-skating and tube socks of the 1970s, and please don’t ask me to explain exactly how that happened.

Twelve people are on the thread these days, although that number’s been known to vary. Not everyone’s on it. If everyone were on it, I would check my phone after a few hours away and find not 148 messages but 1,480. This is a large clan. Each time I turn around, it’s larger, a chimeric formation of vital, interesting, profoundly decent and loving people. Some are related by blood. Some are related by marriage. And some, like me, are related by the miracle of blessed happenstance.

The Richardsons are my Family Part Two, the peeps who took over after I lost my Family Part One. I sometimes (often) confuse people by referring to “my late father Louis” in one breath and “my dad Dan, who lives in Vermont” in another, at which point I can see little thought bubbles forming over their heads (WAIT WAIT WAIT AMY’S FATHER IS DEAD? ALIVE? DEAD? ALIVE? AND HE HAS TWO NAMES? WTF?) and I launch into a blathery genealogical disquisition explaining precisely how I came to have two fathers, one living and one gone; two mothers, both of them gone; an extra batch of truly awesome siblings; and a mass of similarly awesome satellite relatives whose exact relationships would require several more long, heaving Faulknerian sentences to explain in full.

I met the nuclear core of Richardsons 40 years ago this spring, when Dan was wrapping up his first year as headmaster at the wee girls’ arts school where my mother ran the music department. I was 13, an awkward nerd with dreadful bangs, clanging oral hardware and older parents always teetering on medical catastrophe. But Mama was wise. She saw and comprehended. Egged on by her, I fell in with this young and energetic brood: Dan and his wife, Pat. Jenny, their eccentric black lab. Their kids Danny, Randy, Betsy. Nils, their first add-on/bonus kid. They were clearly prone to such add-on/bonuses, picking up friends who became family through the mystical alchemy of time and love and laughter. Somehow, they wound up adopting people (plus dogs, but that’s another story), and I was lucky to be among the adoptees. When my childhood family died, that sealed it. “Consider my parents yours,” Danny wrote.

I’m always quoting that moment — in my writing, in my conversation, in my mind. It was so giving, so perceptive and complete. Isn’t that what family does? Give us precisely what we need precisely when we need it, whether a hug or a harsh correction? In this case I needed family itself, and so they gave of themselves. The gift alone was proof of its authenticity. It has proved itself, over and over, in all the years that followed, through the births of my children and the death of my husband and every spasm of life besides. Their arms stretched to embrace us, and we stretched back.

This past Easter weekend, a bundle of extended Richardsons gathered in Vermont for a wedding: Danny’s middle son, Cooper, and his beloved Olivia. We all laughed and ate and laughed and talked and laughed and danced and laughed, and somewhere between the eating and talking and dancing and laughing, we found a quiet moment to reflect with gratitude on what we shared as a family. There, sitting amid a Sunday feast at my brother Randy’s house, I marveled at the accidental genius that brought this group together, at the love exemplified by Dan and Pat as they opened their hearts to stragglers like me, at the love that still abides in that beautiful and ever-expanding assemblage of characters.

On Wednesday, I met Cooper and Olivia at that bakery on the Upper West Side. They were in Manhattan for a quick trip; so, as it turned out, was I. We ordered a mini banana cream pie, a kind of pudding ne plus ultra, and ate and laughed and talked and laughed and laughed. I texted photos of the empty pie dish and the happy couple to our fellow Richardsons, who erupted with joy in the thread.

Hugging the newlyweds goodbye, I thought: I could not have guessed, as a nerdy 13-year-old, that my life would expand to include these two beautiful young people. And so many others. So many arms of love.

This isn’t the family I was born into. That family, my Biancolli family, went on too soon to their glorious Elsewhere. But that loving family gave me this one before they left, and it’s a gift of endless proportions. It goes on and on and on and on, just like the text thread. Only longer. And better. And richer, with or without the pudding.

Twenty-five years ago tomorrow night, on April 5, 1992, I lost my sister Lucy to suicide. She was 31, I was 28, and I vowed forever after that I would live my life for two.

Twenty-five years ago on Thursday morning, I rose and learned the news. I never knew at what hour, exactly, she’d swallowed a mess of useless psych meds and curled up on her bed with a stuffed bear to wait. Probably it happened before midnight. I had returned late from a few days away, and I was feeling exhausted and nauseated and achy. But the answering machine was blinking that night, so I pressed “play.”

Two messages, both from Lucy. I hadn’t told her I’d be away. Those were the days before cell phones. She had no way of reaching me. No way of even knowing I was out of town.

In the first message, left around 8 p.m., she was desperate. Sobbing. Pleading with me to pick up. Ame Ame Ame Ame. Please. Please be there. Please. Ame Ame Ame.

Oh, my God, I said. Oh my God, oh my God.

And then the second message played. She left it, I think, around 10 p.m., and she sounded perfectly normal. Am fine now, Ame! Don’t worry about me. Everything’s okay. Sorry about the earlier call. No need to phone. Feeling much better. I love you!

So I went to bed. I didn’t try calling her back. Because she was okay, right?

The next morning, the phone rang early. I lay in bed and let the caller leave a message. A few minutes later, I listened to it: an old family friend asking me to call him as soon as I woke. It was important, he said. It had to do with Lucy, he said. Please call, he said.

I knew immediately that she was dead. I called my friend and got his son. “I’m so sorry,” he said. I asked him if Lucy had killed herself. “Yes,” he said. “I’m so sorry.” I told him I was sorry he had to bear the news. I said this because no one should ever have to bear that news. I thanked him, and hung up.

I thought of Lucy’s second message. She’d left it, I was sure, after resolving to die. She’d left it because she didn’t want me to try calling her back and then worry through the night. She wanted me to get a good night’s rest before learning my sister was dead. It was so caring of her. So typical. So Lucy.

I held my husband and called my mother. She told me Lucy had OD’d. And I said, Mama. Mama. Mama.

“Oh, honey,” Mama said. “The poor thing. She’s not suffering any longer.”

No. No, you’re right, Mama. She’s not. That’s true. She’s not.

“Poor, sweet Lucy.”

Poor, sweet Lucy.

She was the sweetest person. The bravest person. The smartest person. The wisest, the goofiest, the most credulous and curious and radiant — a small, beautiful, interesting, interested, fiercely true human being who played Chopin as though she knew him and greeted the world with wonder despite her pain.

Burdened with unyielding psychiatric problems, she had spent too many years of her life bouncing from psych hospital to psych hospital and useless meds to useless meds and wrong diagnosis to wrong diagnosis, settling finally on temporal lobe epilepsy with a complex array of psychological issues on the side. The upshot: She was suicidal. Pretty much all the time, she was suicidal. Even when she put on a sunny face for friends, she was suicidal. Even when she was busy talking me through my latest silly man-woe, she was suicidal. She was almost never not suicidal.

She had tried once before, swallowing earlier fistfuls of those useless meds and awaking from a coma with a renewed appetite for living. I’ve written about that before. I’ve written sundry other blog posts describing our sisterly adventures, like that time I damn-near died hiking with her on Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh and then that time we both damn-near died in a car crash. I also wrote about her in my first memoir, House of Holy Fools; it’s a safe bet I’ll be writing about her again. How can I not?

Even after 25 years, I miss her. I’m spilling a few tears as I write this, proof that you never really “get over” the death of a loved one, you just make your path through life around it. You take all that you learned from your absent treasure — all that they showed you, all that they shared with you, all of the life and love between you — and you wrap it around your shoulders and chest like a blanket against the cold. That’s my Lucy. She warms me still. She shows me how to live and love and always will.

She lived the way we all should live: without fear, restraint, self-consciousness, selfishness, small-mindedness, duplicity, cruelty or guile. She loved the way we all should love: with her whole being. She faced this world the way we all should face it: squarely. She embraced it in its fullness despite her own mysterious torment, and she lived life as though she meant it, as though it mattered, as though it harbored miracles. It was never easy for her, but she stuck it out as long as she could with as much joy as she could. And when she couldn’t, just before dying, just because she couldn’t take a breath on this earth without loving, she made one last phone call so her kid sister could get some sleep.