Janice Eileen Kuehl

On the comfort of placing people, and the things that refuse to be placed

Her obituary called my grandfather her good friend. Forty years, and that’s the phrase that made it to print.

The easy version of this essay is the one where I tell you that phrase was wrong. That it diminished her. That the careful language was a cage. That is not this essay. I respect the phrase, and I respect the choice behind it.

The discretion was theirs, kept by both of them on purpose, and I have no interest in standing over their grave and announcing that I know better than they did how to name their own lives.

But I also can’t let it stand as if it were the whole truth, because it wasn’t. So I am going to do something uncomfortable. I am going to leave it unresolved.

Jan was my grandfather’s girlfriend for over forty years. She was also the woman he loved when he was still married to my grandmother.

Everything I’m about to tell you is the truth as I saw it from where I stood, which was one position among several. Others in my family lived this from angles I didn’t have, and carry things I don’t. I respect that. This is mine.

My grandmother is named Doris. She and my grandfather married young, and he was not a good husband to her, and he was not a good father to their children. I knew that early and I knew it up close. I am not going to launder it. He was a cheater and, I’m told, an angry man, though that was never the version of him I got. He cheated on Doris with Jan, and that was the break their marriage didn’t come back from, even though the divorce took years to arrive. The damage was real. It reached my grandmother and it reached her children, my mother among them, and the length of what came after does not erase the beginning of it.

And here is the part that resists the tidy version. They all kept showing up. My grandparents stayed constant at family gatherings through all of it, every Christmas Eve at my grandmother’s house. In the early years Jan was not invited to anything Doris hosted, which is its own quiet sentence about how families hold a wound. But Doris remarried when I was ten, and over time a friendship grew between the four of them that lasted. The people who had every reason to keep it simple did not keep it simple. They lived in the gray too. I just watched them do it before I had a word for it.

Both of those things are true. They do not cancel. They do not average out into some tidy middle verdict. He wronged my grandmother and he loved Jan for the rest of his life, and you are going to have to hold both of those in the same hand, because I have had to, and because that is what was actually real.

This is the part people cannot stand. We want to place a relationship. We want to know whether it was the affair or the great love, the betrayal or the romance, the thing we condemn or the thing we mourn. We reach for the category because the category is where the tension goes to die. Good friend is a category. Mistress is a category. Tragic, star-crossed, kept on the periphery, all of it, categories, little boxes we build so we can set the discomfort down and walk away.

I am not going to give you a box.

Because the truth is that I don’t get to place them, and neither do you, and neither did their family that spent forty years trying. The nature of what they had was theirs. It was theirs to define, theirs to keep, theirs to leave unnamed in a program if that is what they chose. My grandfather told me, privately, in the only way available to him, that he loved her and would have married her. He meant it. He also kept it quiet, and I believe he kept it quiet partly because that was the shape they wanted, not only the shape forced on them. He loved her. That much I can tell you. What to do with it, where to put it, how to weigh it against everything else, I can’t, and I stopped trying somewhere along the way, which is more than most of the people in that room ever did. So I’ll tell you the thing I actually know. I watched her.

Jan was always quietly in the background. At my high school graduation, at my recitals, at every gathering she was there for, she was the one making sure you had a drink, making sure you had food, clearing the plates while the event was still going, slipping out of the room and back into it, taking care of everyone and asking for nothing. Most people registered this as the background hum of a gathering that ran itself. It did not run itself. She ran it, from the edge, quietly, and almost no one looked directly at her while she did.

I looked. I don’t know that she knew. I don’t think she would have changed a thing if she had. The care was not performance and it was not for credit. She gave it from a place she hadn’t chosen and couldn’t leave, and she gave it anyway. That has stayed with me longer than any question about what to call her. She taught me care is intentional. Not a feeling you wait on, but a decision, made and then made again, from the edge of a room where no one is looking at you and no one has promised to say your name when you’re gone.

I almost didn’t speak at her funeral. I was Larry’s granddaughter, which in that room was its own ambiguous thing, neither family to her nor stranger. But the obligation I felt had nothing to do with where I fit. It had to do with the fact that someone should stand up and witness her, and that I was someone, and that the alternative was letting her go into the ground placed and filed and quietly contained, the way the careful language had always contained her, when the truth was so much larger and so much harder to hold than any single phrase could carry.

So I said her name. I said she taught me care is a choice you make continuously. I said that even from the periphery her impact was quiet and powerful, and everyone understood the word periphery, and no one needed it explained.

Janice Eileen Kuehl's obituary called her his good friend. I won’t correct that. It was true. It also wasn’t the whole of it, and both of those stay true at the same time. The rest, the love, the wrong, the four decades, the quiet they chose and kept, belonged to two people who are gone. It was never mine to resolve. It isn’t yours either.

I knew her my whole life and I still can't tell you what she was to me. I've stopped thinking that's a problem. She lived a life and a love that no single word could define, and she lived in that ambiguity quietly, and on purpose, until she died. So I'm choosing not to. I'm going to leave her where she was, in the gray, and call that the most relationally ethical thing I can do.