LIFE'S GREATEST MYSTERY

Cousin Fannie would say that life’s greatest mystery is when you will die. At Fannie’s son Irv’s suggestion, after many years of minimal contact, I called his younger brother Ron, who lives in Colorado. I can’t remember when I last saw Ron, probably sometime in my early childhood, but I feel so close to Irv and Ron and can’t imagine life without them.

Irv lives in upstate New York, and I see him when we take jaunts to the Catskills, where I spent my childhood summers at the bungalow colony his grandparents and parents owned. I’ve written about them before,* but after speaking with Ron, it was like a revelation.

That beckons another major philosophical thought: how we don’t speak with someone for nearly a lifetime, yet still feel so connected to them from our youth. Irv is one year younger than my brother Al. They spent all those summers at the bungalows hanging out and playing together, yet they don’t contact each other. There’s no rhyme or reason; it just doesn’t happen.

Ron told his daughter, his only child, that he has a box of pictures from his mother’s collection, and he wants to plan a trip east with her and the photos. He hopes that whenever she can take time off from her job in Seattle, they can drive to New York to visit his brother and bring the box of pictures.

Ron feels that, being four years his senior, Irv may be able to identify more of the people in the photos. Appreciating my interest over the years, Ron said he’ll mark the box so that his daughter will give the pictures to me someday.

I asked Ron if his daughter knows about us, and he assured me she does. He said he’s been telling her about different people. I wanted to be sure she knew that my grandfather was at Ellis Island to greet his niece, a great-grandmother of Ron’s daughter, (Ron’s maternal grandmother), when she arrived in America. I only wish that we all knew more of the backstory.

Irv remembers my mother’s phenomenal cooking and baking, while Ron recalls my father chasing him after some admitted bad antics. I never forgot the gift of two dresses their father brought me in size 6X for my July birthday, celebrated at the casino in the bungalows, or the wisdom that their mother imparted on her many visits. Those are lasting memories we revisit and hold onto throughout the years.

*One of my earliest blog posts was “My Happy Place,” dated July 4, 2018, at sharonmarkcohen.com. Other posts of interest are available at sharonmarkcohen.com, including “Life Is So Strange,” dated April 2, 2019; “Friendly Ghosts of the Catskills Past,” dated September 28, 2021; “If Those Walls Could Talk,” dated January 23, 2024; “Try Me,” dated March 26, 2024; and Seeing a Meme and Hearing My Deceased Relatives Speak (July 22, 2025). Look back; you’ll get the drift.

Young Irvin and his brother Ron