The Giants = Family Healing

I've been a fan of the Giants going as far back as I can remember. It's in my blood. Despite this, I came to my current rabid fandom only within the last ten years or so. I was living out of state during the horrors of the 2002 World Series, keeping up with it, but thankful that I did not have cable at the time. Everyone in my family is a Giants fan except one of my two brothers. He was never a sports guy, and if he enjoyed any sport at all, it was hockey. Certainly not baseball.

My feelings about the Giants aren't necessarily unique, but proof that sports can be healing. Championships can make the unbearable seem survivable, if only for a few weeks. My brother, the non-Giants/sports fan, died in 2009 from metastatic melanoma at 34. I was living in Los Angeles at the time of his diagnosis, and spent a lot of time driving back and forth between there and home to be with him. At that time I didn't have cable and other than the internet (I wasn't on Twitter at that point), my main source of baseball information was the sports section of the Sunday edition of the LA Times. Suffice to say, at that point, baseball was the furthest thing from my mind. The seven months between my brother's diagnosis and this death were the worst seven months of my life.  I was certain for at least an entire year that I could never feel any kind of joy again. For anything. 

While the first half of the 2010 Giants season was a bit of a blur (my life was a blur at that point), I remember the second half pretty well. If the Giants had won their first World Series title in San Francisco during 2009, I wouldn't have been able to really enjoy or appreciate it. It would've been too soon. But this was 2010, when we all needed something positive to hold onto. I can't properly explain what the Giants meant to my family in 2010, even if most of us couldn't verbalize it. When the Giants won the NL West division in September, it was the first time I'd felt alive in a long time, which had to do both with my brother's death and other things from the last few years. 

What's odd about 2010 is that what I remember most, besides the last out of the NLCS (which I got to experience with a fellow Giant fan) and the World Series, is Thanksgiving a few weeks after the World Series was over. My family had something positive to talk about, something great bringing us together. If my brother had been a Giants fan, I would've perhaps felt guilty that he wasn't there to see it. It would've been bittersweet somehow. But he wasn't a Giants fan, and yet I felt in some small way that he had something to do with the Giants finally winning a World Series in San Francisco that year. Like he was looking out for us in some weird way. I know that makes sense to no one but me, but it's the things you tell yourself when you go through something like that. It's the only way to make sense of the absurd.

We were no less confounded by the two World Series titles the Giants have won since 2010 when we got together for those Thanksgivings. We might be baffled by different players, but the song is the same. The Giants are in some way responsible for my family being able to survive the worst experience of our lives and I will be forever grateful to them for that. And flat-out bewildered.