Difference as a gift

Plus: How you can help my neighbors in Minneapolis

Me and Charlie in Chicago in 2009, looking very much like the odd couple we were.

As I mentioned in my last post, I recently helped my mom as she put together a funeral service for my stepdad Charlie after he died on Christmas day.

Years ago, as his Alzheimer’s was getting worse, my mom asked if I would one day write and present Charlie’s eulogy when he eventually passed. I have experience writing and speaking, and she thought it might be too difficult to do it herself. When the time came a few weeks ago, I was of course happy to help.

Together, she and I worked on a number of versions of the eulogy. In the end we decided on the following structure: I opened with a biographical overview, shared a bit about his impact on our family specifically, and then invited his kids to come up and share a personal reflection each. Finally, my mom shared a reflection of her own. I was tremendously moved by the pieces my siblings and mom shared, and very glad we ended up going about his eulogy in this way.

Me, my siblings, and Charlie playing some mini golf on a road trip to Michigan my junior year of high school.

I don’t want to share his entire eulogy here, as that was for his family and friends. But I’ve been reflecting a lot this week on the forces in American life seeking to drive us apart, and as I have, my thoughts have returned to my stepdad. So I want to share a little piece of his eulogy.

What follows is the portion I wrote for the part where my siblings and I each shared a personal reflection about our stepdad:

My first impression of Charlie was that he was very different from me. He was from North Dakota, lived on a hobby farm, did a lot of manual labor, and loved motorcycles. I didn’t really care about any of those things and wasn’t sure what to make of him.

My uncertainty turned to skepticism when I was asked to help out on the farm. I made no secret of my disinterest, but everyone was expected to pitch in, and I was no exception. One time I nicked my finger collecting brush and made it out to be a catastrophic injury; I was given a Band-Aid and told to continue. It was clear the farm life didn’t agree with me. I wasn’t sure Charlie did either.

Not long after Charlie came into my life, I came out to my mom as gay. She was supportive and started looking into resources for me, but I never imagined that one of those resources would end up being Charlie. I had some assumptions about what he might think of my being gay, and was trepidatious about her telling him. But I was wrong to assume. Charlie had a brother in California, Jerry, who was gay, and he quickly invited Jerry and his longtime partner Bob to come visit us in Minnesota. I didn’t really know any gay people, and Charlie knew I needed role models to look up to who could help me imagine a future for myself.

Of course, while I was grateful to have gay role models at a time I really needed some, Charlie himself became an even more significant role model for me over the years, in ways I never would have imagined as an adolescent.

On paper, Charlie and I may not have seemed the most natural compatriots. We had few shared interests and occupied very different worlds. We disagreed on some things, and neither of us was shy about saying so. But while I may have had my suspicions about how much we would get along when he first entered my life, Charlie never made me feel like he wished we were more alike.

He challenged me, yes, and introduced me to things he thought were important, like driving a manual transmission, or finishing a project even after you cut your finger. But he always made me feel valued and appreciated for who I was in spite of our differences. In fact, it seemed to me that he found our differences interesting, meaningful, and sometimes even fun. I think the world would be a lot better off if we had more people who shared Charlie’s approach to difference.

As I learned after I came out, Charlie defied conventions. You could never put him in a box. He was a biker from North Dakota, but also a lawyer serving the working class of Saint Paul’s East Side, a founding member of an Alano club, and a lutefisk-loving Lutheran. I’ve tried to emulate his unconventionality as I’ve lived my own very different life, thanks in part to the way he never made me feel I was wrong for not being more like him. I’m grateful for his example of embracing difference in our family, and for the way he trusted me to help take care of him after his Alzheimer’s diagnosis, just as he had cared for me in my adolescence. I will carry his sense of humility, curiosity, and appreciation for difference with me for the rest of my life.

Charlie doing something he loved. This interest actually rubbed off on me; I got my motorcycle permit years ago, and I’d love to have a bike of my own one day.

The night of Charlie’s funeral — the same day Renee Good was killed by an ICE agent in my city — I gathered with neighbors to reflect and talk about our next steps. I was particularly moved by what one of my neighbors, a white woman in her 80s, shared. She explained that she had moved to Minneapolis a few years ago after living in a small town in northern Minnesota for many years. That town had been very Scandinavian, very Lutheran, very white. She liked her life there but, to the surprise of friends back home, she loves it here. She relishes the chance to connect with people from so many different backgrounds. It makes her life richer and more interesting.

This is the gift of life in the city. It presents you with the opportunity to live alongside people who challenge you, expand your horizons, and show you other ways of being human. People who are significantly different from you. Of course, in order to receive the city’s gift, you have to actually embrace this opportunity — by getting to know your neighbors, accepting and appreciating their differences, and stepping up for them in their time of need. (All things my stepdad did for me.)

In that regard, I’d like to share something I’ve been working on with neighbors over the last week.

I’ve heard from many friends outside of Minneapolis who want to help but aren’t sure how. There are of course many ways — though I recently removed Instagram from my phone, I’ve been logging on to my account via my iPad this week to share opportunities to help to my stories as they arise, and will continue to do so as I am able — but this one hits especially close to home. A few people in my neighborhood and I are raising funds for beloved neighbors in our neighborhood of Longfellow who desperately need support right now. Here is the description from our Gofundme page:

We are a small group of Longfellow neighbors, and we have created this fund to administer individual support to meet the urgent needs of families in crisis. We are asking for your donations to meet the following:

• Rent support

• Purchasing groceries and essentials

• Delivering groceries and essentials

• Transportation services

• Legal support services

For the sake of privacy and safety, these families must remain anonymous. If you would like updates or confirmations of what your donation has generally gone toward, we can share them with you privately.

We believe that hyper-local action is a powerful way to support those in need right now, and we are starting right where we live. Your financial support, no matter where you live, is saving lives of people that we know, love, and will fight to protect.

Please give if you can. Again, our campaign is just one of many, but that is what is needed right now: lots of people stepping up for their neighbors all over.

[Update: After just a couple days, our fundraiser had raised more than $50,000, which was beyond our wildest hopes. At this point, we closed the fundraiser to protect the privacy of our group and those we’re supporting. You can find other ways to help out folks in Minnesota here: standwithminnesota.com]

Powerful forces wish to see us divided, to see neighbor turn on neighbor. We can and should refuse their noxious call to put up walls and close our hearts. But we should also go a step further. It’s not enough to simply not harm your neighbor. You also need to come to their aid. I have been so heartened to see Minneapolis choose neighborliness in recent days, whether it’s my neighbors sharing information with one another and looking out for those in Longfellow who need our support, or the thousands of Minnesotans who turned out on Saturday — despite the single digit wind chill temperatures — to protest. (We were there all afternoon, and while it was cold, it was also so heartening and beautiful.)

I have also been moved by you, our national and global neighbors, reaching out arms of love from afar. We are ultimately all neighbors, and I’m so grateful for those who see the importance of stepping up for others and paying back the gift of difference.

Thanks for reading, and take good care.

P.S. Thank you to everyone who has offered support to me and my family over the last few weeks. For more on my stepdad, I invite you to consider checking out the final chapter of my last book IRL. I wrote it while helping my mom take care of him following his Alzheimer’s diagnosis. That was a very fraught time, and I tried to honor the impact that taking care of him had on me as I wrote about it.

Me and mom at Charlie’s funeral.