JAN'S HOODIE
“…while he was a bespectacled intellectual and Emmy-winning screenwriter, he was also a cheesehead.…”
Team sports—or, rather, male team sports and the men who live for them—trigger me. My abusive father, whom my mom courageously freed us from just before my seventh birthday, was a fanatic who berated my older brother in Little League, yelled at the TV in the not-fun way during football games, and was the sorest of losers when he played NBA Jam on Nintendo. But one of my most cherished possessions is this Green Bay Packers sweatshirt, simply because it belonged to my uncle Jan.
Jan—pronounced the Polish way, Yahn—grew up in Wisconsin, and while he was a bespectacled intellectual and Emmy-winning screenwriter, he was also a cheesehead who even owned a foam cheddar hat. I learned this about him when I stayed with him and my aunt Jessica in Southern California the summer after fifth grade.
Jan made me a little nervous at first. I was a sensitive trauma survivor with a deep fear of rejection who wasn’t comfortable with men. He was a man who didn’t mince words and had strong opinions—about movies (most popular ones were crap), Scotch (Glenfiddich or go home), and McDonald’s (I could feel his disapproval when we stopped for fries and a Sprite at my request). But he loved Porter, their giant, doofy Bleu de Gascogne hound, nearly as much as he loved my aunt; he tended his rose garden with gentle care; and he spoke to and about the women in his life with real respect.
The more time we spent together on that summer vacation, the more we clicked. I remember the moment when I fully won him over: I corrected him on the capital of Australia—Canberra, not Sydney. My dad would have been pissed. Jan was impressed.
Jan valued my intelligence and sense of humor. Making him laugh—as I did when I suggested that Porter do his head-shake in front of their Christmas tree, so the flying strings of slobber would go to decorative use—was so satisfying. He trusted me to help him build a deck on their house, which forever after he called Cathryne's deck. Jan wasn’t a kid person, but he was definitely a me person.
He died quickly of pancreatic cancer in 2013. In his final hours, my aunt held the phone to his ear so I could say goodbye from New York City.
When my mom and I helped clean out some of Jan’s stuff a couple years after his death, I called dibs on the hoodie. I wear it to watch the occasional game (I even once yelled “Go Pack, go!” at the TV), to feel cozy and comforted on cool fall afternoons—the sort that take me back to the October day I found out my hero was gone—and to remind myself that a kind, brilliant, good man thought I was enough.
—Cathryne Keller
Cathryne Keller is an editor at SELF magazine. She previously held editorial positions at Men’s Health, Women’s Health and O, The Oprah Magazine.