A Certain Understanding
by Amy Campbell Holman
There's nothing subtle about him, my brother-in-law. For one thing, he's enormous — definitely over 300 pounds, with a rock-hard belly that enters the room three seconds ahead of him. He's 35 and has been on blood pressure medication for 10 years.
He talks extra loud and extra long, whether he knows the subject or not. He needs to interrupt you mid-story, when it's your turn, to trump you with how somebody he knows did the same thing only bigger, better, higher or faster. Not him, mind you. Someone he knows. Someone you'll never meet and couldn't, frankly, give a crap about. He fancies himself a comedian, but his quips are so obvious you can see them coming a mile away. Grinning, mugging; he's like a walking infomercial.
His name is Jim, but he'd really like you to call him Jimbo. He seems oblivious to the fact that "Jimbo" begs to become "Jumbo;" he seems oblivious to all of it — the looks between the relatives, the sighs when he launches into another poorly timed story; the chore that suddenly needs to be done in another room.
He's a shirt-tail relative — my husband's sister's husband — and I always think that gives me some special dispensation: I'm not really related to this uncouth loudmouth, a mantra I soothe myself with between holidays, those 8-hour endurance marathons. The people I'm obliged to in this situation, I tell myself, are my husband and his parents, whom I love and usually love, respectively. Jimbo's wife and I have never been close, but she's nice enough when she's not mired in the longstanding family tradition of clinical depression.
Unfortunately, she often is. Things get really subdued when her mother's there with her, brow furrowed, trying to concentrate, trying to enjoy this gathering that she deems good by virtue of its existence alone.
Then last year, my husband joined them. By Christmas he was doing better — hadn't been suicidal in a couple of weeks — but his mom and sister's worry left them largely mute, self-consciously unable to distract him, themselves, or me. They didn't have it in them.
But Jimbo did.
He laughed. He told stories. He spoke to my husband like he hadn't gotten the memo; like there'd been no supernova of a health crisis; like the last six months hadn't been a nightmare. Like he was oblivious. And he pulled me in, like the Earth to the Sun.
Amy Campbell Holman is a reporter and freelance writer whose love of personal stories has recently propelled her into literary journalism and creative non-fiction. She is currently at work on a collection of personal essays under the working title "Mentalphors: Our Year of Mental Illness and What It Was Like." Campbell lives in rural Michigan with her husband, Rob, and daughter, Rosalie, 6.