RIVER CITY JOURNAL: WHO ARE THESE FAMILIAR-LOOKING, AGING PEOPLE?

* As with most extended families, a funeral is the tie that binds. So why does the knot seem to be getting so tight.

It seems to me that attachments grow as families dwindle.

Much of my family on my mother's side was brought together this week by the death of an aunt. This is how we see each other these days. This is how we keep up with those who share the same genes.

It is because of funeral-home visitations that we realize we're getting older. Just glance around the room. There are your parents and your aunts and your uncles. Except it's you and your cousins. Yogi Berra must have been at a wake when he said, "It's deja vu all over again."My Aunt Lois was the youngest of my mother's sisters and the one who I remember the most from early childhood.

Here's something you need to know: I didn't have any brothers or sisters until I was 13 years old. My cousins and they add up to a veritable horde were as much like brothers and sisters as I think any farm boy could have wished for. My childhood recollections are that my aunts were interchangeable. They loved me like their own. And they loved their other nephews and nieces like their own. And my mother loved all my cousins like her own. We were a whole lot like a set of Lego building blocks. You need a brother to build that tree house? Here's a six-sided cousin. That ought to do the trick.

My earliest memories are of being three or four or five years old in South St. Louis, on Geyer, not too far from Grand and the park with the old water tower. The building we lived in was one of those fine old multistoried homes with a mansard roof that had been converted into apartments. We lived upstairs, and in the basement apartment were my Aunt Lois, her husband, Don, and their new baby, my cousin Donnie.

Every time my Aunt Lois and I were together, we would share the same memory from those days immediately after World War II. I'd come down on the sidewalk and tap on the basement windows and ask to come inside to play with the baby. It was a good memory for both of us the way all memories would be if we had our way.

Later, after we moved to a farm in the Ozarks, I didn't see all my aunts and uncles and cousins so often, although there was one set of relatives living on a farm on the valley just over the hill from Kelo Valley. We saw them more than the rest, but it still wasn't like having a crowd at the breakfast table every morning.

Once a year, in the heat of August, the whole clan would gather at the cemetery where so many generations of our family are buried. After clearing the weeds and putting out fresh flowers, we would head to Big Creek for a picnic and an afternoon of reunion. After I went away to college, though, I rarely saw my cousins for almost 30 years. I knew what was going on in most of their lives, thanks to my mother. But I really didn't know them any more.

How does that happen? Once upon a time I could have told you the location of just about every mole on their youthful bodies an embarrassing bit of knowledge that most of the clan would just as soon not have shared.

I returned to Missouri in time for my Aunt Norene's funeral, and I was confronted with a sea of faces I didn't recognize. Oh, sure, I could tell which were Harrises and which were Brosers and which were Colliers and which were Partneys and which were Millers. Family resemblances run deep. But I had to ask some of my cousins: Are you this brother or that brother? Not a good conversation starter at a funeral-home visitation.

Not that chitchat is my family's strongest suit. I've noticed something of a conversational evolution at those family gatherings I've attended. When we were kids, we talked to other kids. Adults talked to each other. Later, the adults started talking to us, usually to remind us how much we had grown or how much we looked like someone else. Then there were the numerous mentions of receding hairlines, balding heads and bulging waists. The next era was consumed with wrinkles and gray hair at least for those of us lucky enough to still have anything worth combing. This week we reached a new plateau: ailments and illnesses ranging from heart-bypass operations to stuck-up colons to arthritic joints.

And these were my cousins talking, the ones I remember from the swimming hole on Big Creek or fishing on Black River or picking blackberries in Kelo Valley.

My aunts and uncles, what's left of them, have their aches and pains too. But they look strong to me. I look at these old people who claim to be my cousins, and then I marvel at their parents: aunts reaching for hugs, uncles shyly shaking hands, all of them defying as best they can the powerful forces that pull us from this life to another.

That's family for you. Somehow the ties grow stronger as we set fewer places at the table for family dinners.

And our most fervent prayer is that we won't ever have to eat alone.

R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.