(Update: The novel is going well. There’s maybe a month till it’s done. It’s really going too well. It must be terrible, because I actually like it. Anyway, it’s much better than the novel I wrote 20 years ago from which this one is derived. Still accepting offers to read it! Topics to come: a refusal to obey is unmasked as a battery; the outrage that is Virginia Thomas.)
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Warning: The following is really dark. It’s a dark time. I wanted you to have the option to tiptoe away if you would prefer to.
This was a hard holiday season. My brother Pete, who is 77, had a thalamic stroke. He is progressing slowly. Apparently he’s OK cognitively but is having trouble swallowing. He was an astrophysicist specializing in optics. I don’t even know what that means. He was the smartest in our family, which isn’t saying much. He and I have had a checkered relationship, but we were firmly in each other’s corner when this happened. He lives in Connecticut now, after a half century in Los Angeles.
At some point, a family dies off. My father and my Polish uncles all died of heart trouble in their 70’s. We’re going about it differently.
When Pete had his stroke, I thought I should let our sister, Ann, who is 74, know. Ann and I haven’t talked for a few years since her husband, John, behaved really badly. I’ll describe that later, but it only capped off 50 years of being an asshat, starting from when he charged me $30 in today’s dollars to drive me from their place in southern New Hampshire to Logan Airport. When she found out, Ann was so mortified that she refunded the dollars by mail without comment. That was in 1972, and it got worse from there.
Before his stroke, Pete tried to call Ann, but he said that John was acting as a gatekeeper—you couldn’t get to Ann except through John. When I heard that, I thought it was just John being even more exceptionally controlling than usual.
However, Nancy is still in touch via Facebook with Ann’s older daughter, Amanda, who lives in Beaverton with her husband and two kids. Amanda is a peach; she was a businesswoman who turned to nursing. So Nancy wrote Amanda about Pete’s stroke.
Amanda called Nancy immediately and gave us the stunning news that Ann has been suffering from severe dementia starting five years ago. John, Amanda says, is protective of Ann and very defensive.
So because John has always had an agenda that excludes everyone else, I’ve now lost my sister forever. John, what, pray, do you have to protect Ann from in the case of her brothers?
Sadly, it doesn’t really matter. From the beginning, when they got married in 1969—can you believe that this conflict has lasted this long? I’ll comment below—John has been a combative, abrasive, self-aggrandizing jerk. No one liked him. As a couple, they seem to have had only one set of friends, who have long disappeared.
So Ann felt that she had to defend John from her first family at every juncture. You could never have a conversation with her that didn’t sound like she was thinking and talking through a fog that was John—always maintaining that everything and everyone was just fantastic, just fine, just the bestest life that could be lived.
It never was. His first job was as a guidance counselor in a high school in New Hampshire. Reliable hearsay had him being fired and them leaving for Oregon because they were giving kids pot. Very hippie-era, but just no.
So off they went to Salem, Oregon, where he worked for the City and she taught in a community college. Once, right after my father died in 1983, my mother and I went to visit them. John and Ann were going out to shop, and, as they were leaving, John turned down the thermostat.
Next John and Ann built, much by themselves, a house in a horrible area west of Salem, in Dallas. You can try to get a good meal there, but you won’t succeed.
The last episode: Our mother was in an assisted living place in Dallas, and Ann necessarily looked out for her. Not that John didn’t complain about how much “Annie” took care of Mom and Pete and I did nothing. Finally, when he voiced this complaint one too many times, I told him that I had offered Ann help, monetarily and otherwise, and she rejected it. So, I went on, the dispute if any was between Ann and me.
When Mom died, and her estate paid out, Pete and I agreed to give Ann money to thank her for her taking care of Mom. It was something like $50,000 total. John never said a word about it.
Then Pete and I traveled to Dallas to see Ann. I had envisioned a dinner where we three laughed and reminisced about Mom and Dad and our childhoods. I had called Ann earlier and told her that Pete and I wanted to take her out for a nice dinner.
In Dallas, I raised again that Pete and I wanted to take her out.
I’ve never seen a look of such anxiety and dread on someone’s face. I realized then how much control John had over her, and how she didn’t want to approach him over it.
But she did, to her credit. His terms: We couldn’t go to Salem (30 minutes away, where you could conceivably get a good meal), and we had to be back from dinner by 6. Yes, 6:00 p.m.
I don’t know how many times in the last forty years I’ve seen Nancy go off to a meal with her siblings to which spouses were not invited. Isn’t that normal? The bottom line is that John doesn’t like Pete or me: he just wanted a free meal and was mad that he wasn’t going to get one.
So we went to this awful barbeque place, where Ann did nothing but talk of “Johnnie”. Didn’t she realize? Then she took half of her meal home to him.
I wonder what was going on. She wasn’t stupid. She must just have been enveloped for so long in this fog that protected John from everyone that she couldn’t see anyone straight. And then she descended into the madness that is dementia. Maybe it’s easier that way.
At any rate, Amanda said that she could tell Ann that Pete had had a stroke, but she wouldn’t remember it a half hour later.
My brother is recovering. They are going to move him from the hospital to a rehab facility.
It’s so odd to think that I’m the only member of my generation of our immediate family left standing. Given how much older the other two are, it shouldn’t be a surprise. But the women on both sides of the family tend to be long-lived, and they don’t get dementia.
Tonight, I’m sitting here in my chair, and my back with its weird epidural lipomatosis is worse. They told me that I couldn’t do anything to make it worse, but who knows. Early this week, I went to see a doc about having a battery implanted in my back that’s connected to electric leads to my spine that will send impulses to trick my brain into thinking that I’m not in pain. The doc said it’s my last resort.
If this doesn’t work, it’ll be highly annoying. I’m essentially alone. I’m not a nice person, and I don’t like people. That’s come back to bite me.
So this is how it ends: the last guy standing has few friends, no society, and is in chronic pain. I read that the worst things you can do for yourself are to live alone and be lonely and not to move much. I’m not moving unless I have to. It hurts too much, and opioids don’t touch it. I’m sorry I come across as whiny. I just don’t know what I did so wrongly to be punished not after I die but right now; the Universe is in that big of a hurry?
The good news is that our democracy should last till November, anyway. Then our American family can be lowered into the grave as well.
The bad news is that the past few years have taught us that, as a people, Americans are no great shakes. Read the history: from the beginning, Europeans saw us as collectively afflicted with ADHD and a mean streak this wide, and our heroic, self-made American businessmen engaged in what was euphemistically called “sharp practices.”
And we have been and are mean-spirited racists; the evidence is out there, poking out of a cop’s holster.
Our national religion is schadenfreude. I love it when someone on like Tucker Carlson or Lindsay Graham is skewered, not that they would acknowledge it. Has everyone forgotten how to say I’m sorry?
The myths of our childhood are evaporating like fog before an insistent sun. It’s too bad, but there it is. And as Nancy and I discuss the racism, the mean-spirited blindness of the right, its bad faith, its cheating, its willful ignorance of the truth, its obstinate refusal to engage in public-spirited civility and compromise, we agree: there is no going back, no wiping up this particular poison. America is done.
Petey, Annie, and Georgie, about 65 years ago.
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