Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: in addition to our annual road trips, my wife Anne and I have a twice-yearly tradition of spending our birthdays together, usually traveling to some new place or attraction as a short-term road trip — partly as an excuse to spend time together on those most wondrous days, partly to explore areas we’ve never experienced before. It’s who we are and what we do. Well, usually. Preferably.

This year I struggled to pick someplace, anywhere, to hit up for my occasion. Nothing lit a light bulb over my head. Should we explore one of the few Indiana small towns we haven’t already combed over for roadside attractions? Revisit one of the large cities in our neighboring states? Break tradition, stay home and binge-watch? Abandon Anne at home, go out alone, attend the Bad Religion/Social Distortion concert happening that very night in downtown Indy, and unwittingly get my teeth kicked out in an impromptu mosh pit? I hemmed and hawed for weeks.

On Mother’s Day the entire brainstorming list fell down the garbage disposal when unconscionably horrible news struck our family: my cousin Shawn had passed away. I was about to turn 52. He’d just turned 50.

Once upon a time in the mid-’70s we were a family of six packed into a section-8 two-bedroom townhouse — me, my mom, my grandma, my aunt and uncle, and Shawn. Not that I recall much from way back when, mind you. Somehow that cramped setup worked until their half of the family needed room for expansion. Eventually Shawn would end up the oldest of four. In our formative years we saw each other pretty often. Adults in previous generations were all about constantly visiting other relatives, keeping tabs on each other, gabbing every other day on their rotary phones, sometimes even handwriting letters to each other. Without social media, internet, email, or more than three broadcast networks, visiting was some folks’ favorite hobby.

Farther into the ’80s, Mom and I frequently went over to their place and babysat the quartet. I’d play with my cousins while Mom kept up with her prime-time stories or maybe checked out the cable TV, which we didn’t have yet. Shawn and I were closest in age and naturally had dovetailing interests of the era. Legos were definitely a thing we all had, back when everyone said “Legos” without some internet toad popping up and telling you, “Um well actually the plural of Lego is ‘Lego’.” I had a sizable G.I. Joe collection going, while he amassed more Transformers than I ever did. And so on went our respective hobbies.

By 1986 all my local friends had moved or cut ties, effectively ending our neighborhood Dungeons & Dragons games. From the ashes of one dead hobby arose a new one: I began adapting my AD&D modules into comics, starring the player characters created by every kid who’d ever played.with me. My first several issues were done in stick-figure art except I gave everyone torsos shaped like filled-in Scantron ovals rather than basic sticks. I dubbed their team and my first series “The Gang”. I leaned into whimsy with my snarky banter and my love of slapstick, and couldn’t be bothered to think up a serious name. It was probably a thin-air pull. All I knew was it gave me something to focus on besides my everyday junior-high angst.

As with many a wannabe comics creator, I refused to show my precious works to any other living soul. Eventually I relented and showed them to Shawn and only Shawn. He seemed pretty excited. I have no idea if he could read my cramped word balloons, but he dug what I was doing. That was a pretty cool feeling. An audience of one is still an audience.

Next thing I knew, on subsequent visits he showed me how he’d started drawing his own comics, starring his own team called “The Troops”. HOW DARE HE, yelled one of the indignant eighth-grade voices in my head, COMICS ARE MY THING! He showed me pages of characters and concepts he’d come up with, likewise stick-figured. His lettering was even more illegible than mine. I hope I responded politely without sounding fake. I do remember a slowly dawning realization I couldn’t put into words at the time: somehow, I think I might have…I dunno, inspired someone somehow for possibly the first time about anything ever? That felt weird.

I didn’t dwell on it. Chances were he’d get bored, the impulse would fade, and we’d go back to our usual activities. He’d have his Transformers, I’d have my comics, and pop culture touchstones would keep piling up between us.

At some point his mom/my aunt moved them all to the south side — not that far from our longtime west-side place, really — and the regular visits stopped altogether. To this day I don’t know why. You’d have to ask the adults. I’m sure they eventually didn’t need a babysitter. I know my free time vanished forever when I got my first job in eleventh grade. Whatever happened, by high school Shawn and I weren’t seeing each other much anymore. We each tended to our respective hobbies and probably had our own lives to lead, mingling less as the grownups seemed less inclined to visit. We still had Thanksgiving and Christmas, and occasional major events where we’d try to catch up.

I do remember attending his high school graduation. Some official thought it was a brilliant idea to give each graduate a helium balloon to hold during the ceremony. As the overlong procession wore on and we were forced to pretend to listen to one boring speaker after another and watch hundreds of strangers march on- and offstage, a cluster of students had begun tying their balloons together into one long, continuous strand and seeing if they could reach the gymnasium’s high ceiling without letting go. Upward the balloon-column climbed, daring to reach for the heavens. It was easily the most interesting part of the evening. I never verified if he was the mastermind or even volunteered his balloon for the cause, but I cannot imagine him refusing.

The older we got, the farther our lives diverged, and our shared moments grew rarer still. While I stumbled down a “prodigal son” path of sorts and had a son, he eventually had three kids of his own, two of them named after characters I knew quite well. My other cousins, his brother and his two sisters, likewise begat families and over time their side of the family turned into this massive ecosystem. Their “side of the family” is now basically “The Family”, while I’m kind of a gnarled knob jutting out one side of the family tree. That’s my self-perception, anyway.

I was still invited to occasions — the holidays, the occasional birthday party, the weddings and the like. Juggling schedules was a challenge, but I tried. Among the highlights was, as longtime MCC readers can imagine, marrying Anne in 2004. Shawn served as my Best Man, and his youngest sister Tracey was our wedding photographer. Our lead photo above, of me and Shawn sitting on the chapel stage, was her handiwork. Great time, many photos, long day.

At one of those gatherings, he shared a bit of mind-blowing news: he’d done some actual comics work. A tiny publisher had begun making their own comics and he’d come aboard as their letterer. Cosmic irony notwithstanding, I was extremely happy for him. To this day he has actual comics credits to his name, which is more than I can say as a reader and collector of 45 years.

Another time, I was privileged to view a portion of what had become a massive Transformers collection — a six-foot bookshelf in his living room sporting hundreds of prized toys and pieces from that universe. I’m pretty sure that was a mere fraction of what he’d amassed over the decades. He had the knowledge and trivia to back it all up, too. He knew every animated series in and out, and of course had thoughts on all the live-action movies, such as they were. I hadn’t kept up since the G1 cartoon days, hadn’t read any licensed comics after Marvel’s first year, and the last two characters I owned were Insecticons, Chop Shop and…maybe Shrapnel? (Those two are still in the garage somewhere.) For him, the Autobots and Decepticons were absolutely a lifelong passion.

Also cherished: that time “Weird Al” Yankovic came to Indy and played at the Old National Centre. I attended “stag” as a birthday gift from Anne (concerts aren’t her thing), then found out at the show that Shawn was also there with at least one of his kids. We found each other later, and he did me the huge favor of offering me a ride back to my car, parked on the other end of downtown. Small world, great minds, et cetera.

Otherwise…he and I never aged into party people, even before the pandemic wiped everyone’s schedules. Despite the advent of Facebook making instant connections possible with loved ones and schoolmate-strangers alike, we didn’t really reach out a lot. I don’t know about him, but the “Initiate Contact” switch in my brain broke during childhood. That’s a long story in itself, unrelated to him, but the bottom line is if I call you up and ask if you wanna go hang out together, you should probably aim a blowtorch at my face because I’ve been replaced by a pod person. My impostor would suck for killing and replacing me, but I suck even more that way.

On May 4th Shawn wrote what may have been the longest Facebook post of his entire life. (Not a 3000-word essay like some of us happen to be prone to rattling off. For him it was wordy.) He’d been diagnosed with liver cancer at the end of February. Apropos of him, he’d kept it private for over two months as he negotiated the healthcare system and underwent tests to get onto the transplant list. Then another medical complication arose that technically improved his priority level by making matters worse. He posted one more time four days later, sharing news of his improved condition and feeling optimistic about where the process would lead next.

The morning of May 12th, Tracey contacted us. Something had gone wrong overnight and left him barely breathing. He was in the hospital again/still. She delivered the dreaded message that normal people with interpersonal skills understand when they hear it: “We’re all going up to the hospital.”

I’ve heard that coded message five times in my life and it never sinks in. Not in ’91 when I was dragged to see a grandparent with lung cancer who’d turned into a small, wired potato and soon passed away at age 52. Not in ’03 when my grandma, literally the most important person in my childhood, was stricken by pneumonia in the nursing home three hours from our house. (We drove down quickly anyway, but were too late.) Not in 2011 when lung cancer also felled an older uncle. (Again we tried; again the Grim Reaper bested our three-hour drive.) Not in 2015 when cancer came for my own father, with whom I was never close and who showed up for me so few times that he’d barely achieved “recurring character” status.

And not in 2024 when Tracey couldn’t get through my thick skull. I’d just gotten out of church and was preparing to take my mom out for Mother’s Day lunch. But Shawn was in the hospital, right? That incontrovertibly sucks, but there’re doctors right there who’d doctor him, and that meant cause for hope, right? Anne was still at church, but I figured we could go visit him that afternoon, add some cheer, catch up on things. I could ask him what he thought of Daniel Warren Johnson’s recent Transformers reboot, which I personally find to be quite an amazing war story, not unlike his own creator-owned Extremity.

If she’d put a medical professional on the phone and had them tell me something concrete such as, I dunno, “He has forty-six minutes to live,” and clicked a ticking stopwatch for maximum radio-drama impact, I think I might’ve responded to that. But that isn’t how any of this works. It’s categorically unfair to expect pre-bereaved loved ones, feeling crushed under the weight of impending tragedy, to be that precise, or persuasive, or even remotely coherent. I failed to Get It.

Couple hours later, Tracey updated us. We had, to put it terribly, missed the visitation window.

The rest of Mother’s Day was nothing but grey.

For all our commonalities, Shawn and I were in rather different places spiritually. That weighed on me a lot. Like, more than a lot.

He was two years younger than me. Several times a day I’ve drifted back to a previous essay of mine — the one about the never-ending list of famous people I’ve outlived — the many who’ve passed away younger than I am today. Some were self-destructive. Some were outrages. Why I’ve been given this many years so far is a plot point known only to the Lord.

But I’d never had a younger relative die within my lifetime, not even on Anne’s side. This was far worse. Far more unfair. Far more unreal.

I wasn’t surprised when Mom called me Monday night and told me the services would be held Friday the 17th.

I’d seen the cosmic irony coming and was prepared to accept my annual birthday outing would be devoted to saying goodbye to my cousin Shawn.

I was not prepared for the nature of the event. Though not explicitly billed as a “celebration of life” in his obituary, the gathering was totally one of those. We spotted a few strangers and many relatives in the main room and steeled ourselves to go through the motions.

Within moments we realized we were hearing “Bohemian Rhapsody” over the P.A. — not a Muzak rendition, not a funereal cover from some crappy movie trailer, but the real song, the Wayne’s World anthem, soaring Brian May solo and all.

Then there were the memorial cards.

We looked beyond the suits and the rows of chairs, the poster boards full of family photos and the requisite digital photo gallery. (I saw myself a few times here and there.) All around the room, on all the end tables and on display up front were artifacts from his collections. Not just Transformers, though of course they were represented. He’d upgraded his collecting game. The family felt it was only right that the proceedings tell us his story and his interests.

Music continued throughout the “showing” portion of the program, all culled from his playlists. At times I could hear the Foo Fighters, Green Day, and the Offspring taking turns, among other acts who’re also in my CD collection. We’d grown apart geographically, but our musical tastes had some overlaps anyway.

So, we realized, this would not be a standard service overseen by a single elderly stranger who never knew him. No one delivered a boilerplate eulogy with family names inserted, like the world’s dullest Mad Libs game.

Neither Anne nor I could bear to take a pic of the United Federation of Planets flag draped over his casket. Even though he named an entire daughter after a Trek character, somehow I’d missed that he was really, really into Trek like we are. I’ll never know if he memorized episode titles like Anne does, but he kept up with all the series for sure. Among the many lamentable aspects of all this is that his untimely passing means missing the last three episodes of Discovery, which his brother confirms he liked.

When the hour struck and service was set to begin, the audience hushed as one last song played overhead. Within two measures I couldn’t help chuckling mournfully inside as I recognized the somber piano opening of Linkin Park’s “What I’ve Done” from the soundtrack to Bay’s first Transformers film.

His brother, his sisters, his son and his daughters each took turns sharing their heartbreak and their memories. Through tears and laughter, often at the same time, our six speakers summed up all the best parts of his life — what we’d all missed, and what they’ll miss without him. My cousins have also gotten older, but they’re all exactly as I remember them. His kids are all adults now — each bearing aspects of him, each sharing his various interests, if not necessarily taking on his full mantle as a walking Encyclopedia Cybertronica.

I alternated laughing and tearing up as I listened. I did both at once when his son held up the personalized Yu-Gi-Oh card that his dad got at Gen Con 2009, just like mine. I never knew we’d all gone to that same show. Small world, great minds, et cetera.

In addition to their spoken parting words, the memorial cards offered a quote on the flip-side from the wartime philosopher Optimus Prime:

“Above all, do not lament my absence, for in my spark, I know that this is not the end, but merely a new beginning. Simply put, another transformation.”

Eventually the tributes ended and time grew to a close on this, the worst-ever reason for a family reunion. Though we’d had smiles amid the nostalgia, the flashback highlights, and the much-loved legacy he’s left behind, we were silent for the entire car ride home. I’m still not 100% okay, but hitting “Publish” on this will at least nudge me toward the next step in the process. For everyone else in the family, I pray they’re granted strength and comfort through their journeys in the days and weeks ahead.

As for that irrelevant birthday of mine…I never thought once about it while we were there. Far as that went, this day was a tough one, but it was more meaningful than any comic-con, any art museum, any bodily damaging concert, or any roadside attraction we might’ve done.

We were honored to spend the time as guests touring the Museum of Shawn.