Dream: Dead Cousin Donald

I'm at a family gathering at my aunt's house.  I'm sitting at the kitchen table.  There's a wooden gadget that I'm trying to figure out.  It's about the size of an upright napkin holder.  The solid wooden base is about 2" x 7" x 1/2" thick.  A dowel sticks up about 8" from the center, and an intricate piece sits a top the dowel.

It seems to function as a cup holder, but I'm trying to figure out how.  I fill a paper cup with red wine and place it on the left side of the center dowel.  There is another thicker piece sticking up from this part of the gadget, too, but I don't notice it until I try to place the cup there.  So I cut the cup to make it shorter and then place it on the gadget. Now it seems to fit.  But i still can't figure out the purpose of the intricate piece or how to operate it.

At that moment my cousin Karen walks in and greets everyone all at once.  I respond with a smile and a "hi" in chorus with my other relatives.  My cousin Donald is with Karen, too, but I remain silent when my family greets him.  Why?  Because he's dead.  I know that he died about 30 years ago.  He also looks different.  The Donald I knew had blonde hair and blue eyes.  This man-child has dark hair and dark eyes.

Knowing that I am in a dream, I attempt to accept that this is really my dead cousin, so I focus on him and ask him how things are on the Other Side.  But the dream fades before he can give me a meaningful response.

[After typing this in, I looked up Donald's date of birth in my mother's old record to see if it was today.  But it wasn't.]