Illustration by Dola Sun
When the Ketteler siblings gather for dinner, the Paul stories can start any time. I find they pair best with dessert. Cookie in hand, someone will say, “Remember when Paul…” and what follows is one of the many absurdities my brother executed at some point in his life of 49 years.
Remember when he was arrested in our driveway after he drove by the police station and yelled obscenities at them? Remember when he got remarried and didn’t tell us and Mom found out only because she randomly saw them at the grocery? Remember when he had that car accident early on Thanksgiving morning and sat at dinner with his face all busted up? Remember when he showed up on Easter and asked what happens if you don’t file your taxes and he and Dad sat at the kitchen table all night working on them? Remember, remember, remember?
It quickly becomes a round-robin, with us all sharing the memories. There’s a kind of a “Top 10” list of stories—the ones we can tell over and over that will never not be darkly funny—and then sometimes a more obscure story will emerge that I haven’t heard in a while, like when Paul gave my sister and brother-in-law a “deal” on roofing work by stealing most of the materials and then not finishing the whole job, all while drinking as much of their beer as he could.
We often do live fact-checking, like, “Remember when he drove his green Chevelle into a lake…” and someone will correct, “Actually, he loaned the car to a friend and he was the one who let it roll into the lake,” and then someone else will correct, “No, the friend actually stole it.”
With Paul being gone for these past 16 years, the stories are what we have left. It’s such an interesting thing that happens with an unexpected death, how one timeline ends and freezes and the other one keeps going. Like an unfinished book that’s been returned to the library. The loan is up, but you’re left with so many questions. And so, month after month, year after year, dinner after dinner, our sibling book club winds its way back through the chapters.
During the recent holiday season, I laughed so hard as we told our Paul stories. This time, I noticed how the next generation took in the tales. The curiosity in their eyes. Crazy Uncle Paul, almost more myth than real. While the older nieces and nephews (in their 20s and 30s) have memories of him, my kids, 15 and 17, are the youngest of their family cohort. They never even met him.
I could see them thinking, Who was this person? I’ve spent most of my life wondering that myself.
The second oldest of seven kids, Paul was born in July 1960. I wasn’t born until 1974, so you could say I’ve been relying on the Paul stories from the start. It all goes something like this: He was the one unlike all the rest of us. Antagonizing. Attention-driven. Mischievous. He was mean to my two oldest sisters, calling them names and picking fights.
According to my oldest brother, if he wanted something from you—say your last cigarette or your last dollar—he’d wear you down until it was easier to simply give in. He dropped out of high school (though he did earn his GED) and eventually started working for a company that put up billboards. At 19, he fell off one, badly injuring his back and knee, setting up an issue with pain pills that would follow him the rest of his life. He worked as a roofer after that, which further beat up his body. And he drank. A lot.
His entire life was his friends, who called him Buck. (When he died, I realized some of them didn’t actually remember that his real name was Paul.) In 1985, he married the girl he’d been dating since high school, and they had a son. They divorced after 10 years of tumult (screaming matches, police called, holes in walls, phones broken from being slammed). He somehow convinced another woman to marry him in the early 2000s.
He was funny but crude. Frustrating as hell, but hard to truly dislike. There was a lot to his life, sorrows and triumphs and moments when he was strangely protective of his sisters, but the Paul stories have primarily developed around his many narrow escapes, cars totaled, money borrowed, schemes attempted, and the way he’d appear when you least expected with a bottle in a paper bag and a cigarette in his mouth. When Paul showed up at a family gathering, it was immediately going to be a different kind of time.
Then, in November 2009, he died. As far as we understand it, he went to sleep one night and didn’t wake up the next morning, not on purpose but because his body had had enough. Our parents were out of town at the time, and his wife didn’t have our phone numbers. My siblings and I learned about his death in various and convoluted ways, and it took the better part of an afternoon to confirm the story. It was all so Paul.
In the few years before his death, we’d seen him just a handful of times. My wedding. Our parents’ 50th anniversary. A Thanksgiving or Father’s Day. I wouldn’t say he was estranged, because it feels like there’s something willful and dark about estrangement. It wasn’t like that with Paul.
Rather, it was more like a fade out. A few months before his death, my mom and dad had visited him at his apartment. It was a good visit, my mom said. She had the sense he was starting to find peace. There really are no Paul stories from this stretch of his life, except, of course, the last headline. Game over.
Recently, I interviewed a man on Long Island about his knee replacement surgery. I write patient stories for various hospital publications and websites, and while I enjoy talking to people and hearing their stories, it’s generally the same information over and over. I was typing away, asking my usual questions about hobbies and how joint replacement has helped him enjoy life again. (Seriously, if you’re in massive pain every day, don’t wait.) He played guitar professionally, he said, and had just played a tribute to Harry Chapin because they’d been friends before he died.
Wait, what?! You were friends with Harry Chapin? I immediately had a million questions for my subject. Forget your knee, tell me about Harry, I wanted to yell!
I was absolutely obsessed with Chapin’s music in high school and college. His brand of social justice found me right as I was awakening to the fact that we lived in an unfair world. There was no internet, but I remember learning a lot about him and his mission to feed the hungry, so I think I must have researched old magazine articles at the library? That sounds like nerdy me.
After that interview, I found all my favorite Harry Chapin songs on Spotify. Sure, “Taxi” and “Cat’s in the Cradle” were great, but the more obscure ones, like “Story of a Life” and “There Only Was One Choice,” really took me back.
What I realized with his music in my ear over several weeks of running was that the stories we have of the dead are mostly about us, not them. We memorialize the dead to remember or understand something about ourselves. My Harry Chapin stories—especially the one about how I would listen to his music in my room on my boombox in the dark, thinking about all the change I was going to make in the world—remind me of the 16-year-old idealistic girl I was, the one who shaped the person I am now who still believes words are one of the most powerful forces on Earth.
If mythologizing Harry Chapin gives off How it started/how it’s going vibes, mythologizing Paul is We’re in it together vibes. Our Paul stories seem to serve this collective purpose of linking us siblings in the battle of life, in the struggle to understand how people from the same family can be as different as night and day.
We all get to play parts in the Paul stories. The Innocent. The Foil. The Accomplice. He’s gone, but we’re still alive in the stories. I’m so glad humor is what’s left. What a blessing it is, this thing we share.
One of us starts, “Remember when he said he was going to teach the phone company a lesson?” Another one of us answers, “He stopped paying his bill.” And then someone delivers the punchline, “He sure showed them.” And we laugh and laugh and laugh.
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