I can see her – I have been there, after all, on a number of occasions – never mind what number – over the past few years: please give me some credit – sitting in a chair staring at the wall in her room, or perhaps in the community room, sitting on a chair and staring at the TV (which comes to the same thing as the wall, mostly). Yes, dear brother, she sits alone, much of the day – there are meal-times, when she is at a table with others: keep that in mind – but mostly she sits alone in a locked wing of the building, the light of her mental life becoming dimmer and dimmer, like a bulb that goes out, not all at once, but little by little. Does she yearn for company? I doubt she does much yearning at all, anymore. Ninety-five is ninety-five. Much of the time, as you say in your message, dear brother, she does not even recognize you, the one who often keeps her company. No doubt, the same goes for the other siblings. Lord knows, she wouldn’t remember who I am. So it seems, whether she sits alone and stares at a wall (or a TV) does not matter much. Any attempt to entertain her is largely lost on that dim mental bulb. This is not Ma. This is not even a shell of Ma. It is, perhaps, the vaguest shadow of Ma.

Since Ma doesn’t know me, doesn’t know you, doesn’t know the other siblings, doesn’t know anyone, you and the others are seeing her, dear brother, not for her, but for you, not to comfort her, but out of your wealth of loving memories. And that is the difference between us – you, apparently, have a wealth of loving memories and I, decidedly and alas, do not. But the situation is puzzling. You have a wealth of loving memories, I say, and yet, the fact of the matter is, dear brother, if I asked you to recall a few of those memories – even one – you would have nothing to say. We tried that once – do you recall? I asked you to expound upon your love of Ma. You said, “We don’t have that kind of relationship.” Oh, just what kind of relationship, then, do you have?

Reading your electronic missive again, short and perfunctory though it is, it seems to imply, for all its paltry content, a note of guilt. How could you, the message implies, not want to visit your poor mother, who sits alone in her room, yearning, perhaps, for company. Would not a son want to visit his mother, in sad and dramatic decline, before her mental bulb, already very dim, has gone out completely? Furthermore, you imply, a son should be powerfully inclined to spend time with his mother, whether or not she is even aware that he is in the room. It should be something a son would want to do out of the loving response of his heart. Yes, your missive has a note of implied guilt. Is there no end to this?

An Attempt at Explanation

Oh, dear brother, I tried hard over many years to enlighten you, as I did the other siblings. But to no avail. Will you ever learn? Alas, I think not. Long ago I gave up trying; long ago I resolved never again to explain myself to you or anyone else. But here I go again. Old habits, it seems, die as hard as old memories. The whole thing, you see, is a matter of what one remembers.

You think I am crazy, don’t you, dear brother? Yes, you, the psychologist and bureaucrat, would think that of me. Our older sister, another psychologist – there are too many of these – in her wisdom, would consult a textbook and give the following diagnosis: “Ducks not in line.” Fine! I am nuts. I have long been the bane of the family; in fact, something of an embarrassment. Small wonder you should think that way – the old man was on your side; the sides were always you and the old man versus our older brother, the truck driver, and me. I want to assert here and now that I object in the strongest terms to these sides. The truck driver and I, like you, were kids, and the old man was a big adult (Emotionally a child, but let that go). Furthermore, he could hit – he did hit – a lot and hard. So let’s choose sides again. I want the old man on my side.

But, oh, do you recall that the old man was not always a reliable ally? He would turn on you. I remember it clearly: you had the most pathetic way of screaming and hollering, while holding your arms over your head, when you were being hit. Once – surely, you have not forgotten this? (the old man had – what do you psychologists call it? – a lack of impulse control?) – he slapped you across the mouth – you must have smarted off to him; you were like that; you shouldn’t have done that – and cut your lip. You recall that, don’t you? Ma, of course, as always, was standing right there. The old man tended to your cut lip with a wash cloth. Ma wasn’t into nursing.

As a psychologist, you would understand that forgetting is as important a function of the mind as remembering. Our minds are made to enable us to forget every bit as much as to remember. How awful not to be able to forget the old pains of our lives! To remember – to relive – the old pain is a lifelong sentence to suffering. When something that happened fifty years ago is relived as if it happened earlier that same day – you, a psychologist, can see the problems that causes. Alas, when one has had the tender parenting attentions of the old man and Ma, one has much to forget. Doesn’t one? But perhaps you lack my peculiar capacity for remembering. With that capacity – how awful! The Lord was in a bad temper the day he made the match of me and them.

I don’t understand women. The female siblings are strongly inclined to take care of Ma. To be sure, Ma behaved differently with male and female offspring (more about this later), but they received no more love than I did. No loving mother could shower love on her daughters and withhold it from her sons. Ma gave no love because she had none to give. Why then are the sisters inclined to be nurturing? It makes me hold in my hands my spinning head. One gives back what one gets. The situation is positively and bizarrely unhuman. A lady-friend I have known for years had a mother who could only be called sadistic, and yet she fawned on her in her dotage. I can only ascribe the situation to the inscrutability of the (female) human heart, and thank God that I do not have that problem.

I like older women. Does that surprise you, dear brother? I really do. Were Ma a loving mother, I would be the most constant and attentive son a mother could have. Time and again, I have encountered women in my life who stirred the love within me for a mother. My ex-mother-in-law, for instance, was a precious woman, if something of a martyr. She raised nine kids to be happy and productive members of society – giving birth to two of them almost killed her – while her husband, a dandy and something of a rogue, was off selling jewelry on the road, all the while drinking too much and, for a time, keeping the company of a secretary in the corporate offices. She endured and stayed the course till he managed to quit drinking – mostly – and quieted down hormonally (something I thought, during the marriage, would never happen). I loved my mother-in-law. How different my life would have been to have had her for a mother, rather than Ma. Perhaps I would have done something with my life. Surely, if all the grief she caused had been given to productive activity, if all the mindless stirring had been creative thought, I would have accomplished something. Perhaps, even, I was bound for greatness, but was thwarted by my dopey mother (and brutish father). Let’s look at my life, in parcels, dear brother:

Beginnings

The young and immature, having their whole lives in front of them, can tolerate what would kill mature people. The first months of my life with Ma – forget about the old man, he didn’t have anything to do with babies: can’t hit them, can’t bully them: women’s work – must have been exquisitely painful. As a psychologist, dear brother, you would know how eagerly, how desperately, babies reach out for their mothers, trying to get a response. With the mother in front of them, they smile and kick and reach out with their chubby little arms. So did I, dear brother.

I can almost see that poor kid, reaching, kicking, smiling, trying his little heart out to get a response. But, alas, it was Ma in front of me, and so, I was getting nothing, or almost nothing back. Ma and me. Ouch! It must have been hell – a lot of writhing in pain.

But, of course, I learned to get what I could, trying my heart out, acting up, when I was older, out of frustration – for which the old man would hit me, from time to time – making do, because what else can one do, with a painful situation. That was my childhood. I recall bits and pieces – lying on the bed downstairs in the dark (I spent a lot of time in the dark). Ma comes to the door, opens it, sees me – for a few seconds we look at each other: mother and son – she closes the door and goes away. Ah, such love… Maybe there was something on the stove. I would get up and go on.

High School

High school was awful. But for youth and a long skein of years ahead that offer at least some prospect of recovery, one could not live with so much pain and so much depression. I was alone a lot. There was a mountain of hurt and a wagon-load of obsessive-compulsive behavior that got bizarre at times. (You caught me once in some ritual, dear brother, and laughed about it. You always were a jokester.)

At seventeen I made the first of two mistakes with regards to Ma. I reached out to her for help. (Reaching out to the old man was never more than a pathetic and hopeless option. He needed to reach out to me for help. He needed my help and my love. – Ma, of course, was no more available to him than she was to the kids. – I was, however, not inclined to help or love the old man. I was more inclined to kill him, but I was too young for that.) Needless to say, the attempt to reach out to Ma was entirely unsuccessful. I was roundly denounced and put down – “You’re wrong to feel that way. It wasn’t like that. It was too easy. Too easy.” And so forth. Unlike you and our older sister, Ma would not have made a good counselor. I have always thought she was ideally suited to being a prison guard. She’d keep those miscreants in line.

Looking back through the years, I can only think, Poor kid. You made it. I’m proud of you. How did you ever survive such parenting?

Ma

There is in this ramble, you would say, dear brother, a note of self-centeredness. Ma had a life, too, you would assert – I can almost hear your protestations – and it wasn’t always easy. Okay, then, let’s be fair. There were seven kids. She had seven kids, and one miscarriage, the Catholic cue to stop having kids. For all that I can remember, she surmounted these hurdles with grace and resilience. I can recall no complaint. My earliest memory is of our older brother and me crawling on her when she was trying to sleep. The woman was exhausted; we were not, and did not, of course, care. I can remember her going off to the hospital for the eighth pregnancy – kissing the girls good-bye – without the least trepidation (“I had a miss,” she would tell me, years later). Yes, she “raised” the kids. For her that meant cooking, cleaning and laundry. The house was well-kept, right down to her impeccable ironing of the old man’s cotton shirts. Her days must have been long and hard. She and the old man did not have a vacation for some twelve years. Even the thought of those kids clambering for attention – not getting more than a starva-tion diet, as I say, but constantly trying – makes my soul ache. There must have been drudgery, fatigue, exasperation and pain. I can recall not a word of complaint. There – I’ve said it. I’ve been fair. Are you happy?

In a future life, dear brother, if such a thing happens, if I happen to be born into a rich family, I will tell the old man to hire a maid.

Oh, but I can hear your further vehement protestations – “Ma had a personality, too. She was much more than your figments.” Indeed, she was. She was sincerely religious, fun-loving and conscientious. She was also vulgar, insensitive and almost completely devoid of empathy. Ma would never have an affair, but she embarrassed me a thousand times by her catty mistreatment of waiters and checkout clerks and her unseemly behavior in public, in general. I hated being in a crowd of people with her, because she was sure to make some embarrassing comment. The people within earshot would blench; Ma would only nod and smile.

Ma is all German. As you may know, dear brother, I am something of a student of history – more of the Civil War, but I’ve read a fair amount about the Second World War, too. The plight of the Germans in that conflagration is of particular interest to me. How could they have come through that awful, horrid, hellish time as a nation and as a people? After the Battle of Stalingrad, when the Allies had the upper hand and determined, with a vengeance, to solve the German problem once and for all (that was our old man’s favorite saying, by the way, “I’m going to take care of this once and for all”), when they outnumbered the Germans four to one on the Western front and twenty to one on the Eastern front, and the German’s had no air cover, but were subject to the constant strafing of the Allied fighters, when the Germans were dying in the last year of the war at the horrendous rate of 16,500 a day, when they faced the frightful prospect of ruthless vengeance from the Russians – payback time – and the terrible bombing of the British and Americans, when Berlin was a particularly dark and dreadful corner of hell – bodies, bombing, fires, people going berserk in pitch black fallout shelters, fear enough to break the strongest of people – how could the Germans go on? How could they have survived as a people and as a nation? Look to Ma for your answer.

When I was married, my wife and I were downtown with Ma just prior to the start of a Univer-sity football game at the downtown stadium. I don’t recall why we were there; it was not to attend the game. (I liked football then no more than I do now – large fellows mostly standing around on a field.) One of the opposing fans – dressed all in red, the color of his team, got into a dispute with my wife over the position in a line to get ice cream cones. Ma and I were chatting at some distance; I didn’t see what happened, initially. I did see my wife say something pointedly to the fan with her mouth at his ear when she had the cones for her and Ma. When she came over to us, she told me that the fan had struck her repeatedly on the shoulder to secure his position in the line. (I’m surprised she didn’t slug him; she was capable of it.) Of course, when I heard this, a typical male, all hormones and offended masculinity, I was entirely ready to “treat the man with considerable prejudice,” as they say in the CIA. Ma stepped in, getting a hold of me and turning the situation in a different direction. We walked off down the corridor, Ma and my wife licking their cones (yes, my wife was tough, too). The situation troubled me (some twenty-three years later, it still does), but Ma was unruffled. She only continued to delight in the conversation and attentions of my wife and me. How did the German people survive? Look to Ma.

The emotional depredations of war are horrible. How did the Germans stand it? How did Ma stand it? Leaving rage and shame aside, my old man could not traffic in feeling of any depth whatsoever. To my knowledge, he never showed Ma anything resembling a strong and overt expression of love. There was some playfulness on rare occasions, but that was all, there was no genuine affection. I don’t mean a little; I mean none. He was not into that. They had companionship, which was constant and, to all appearances, comfortable, if quiet, but that was all. Can that be enough for a woman’s heart? Rarely, I recall Ma showing some exasperation. These fits, of course, brought no response from the old man, save an icy silence, a kind of cold waiting for her angst to pass. They were married for forty-seven years, till his death. How in the world could she live with such a man? How did the Germans stand the emotional depredations of the War? Look to Ma.

The ravages of the War on the population of Germany were horrible. Many were burned to a crisp, crushed lifeless and blown to bits, but what about those who suffered horrible injuries and lived? Medical support for people whose injury was limited to a crushed hand, a severed foot or burns over just, say, twenty percent of the body and so survivable must have been less than forthcoming. How did they survive such trauma? How did they survive the horrible depredations and slaughter in their cities: Dresden: high explosives followed by incendiary bombs setting off a firestorm, and then, to top it off, the America hotshot pilots in their Mustangs coming in to strafe the women and kids crawling around in the rubble. How did they do it?

Everyone has pain. Backs go, joints go, organs develop hurtful ailments. I know – but only by way of a passing mention from her, as one might complain about a dreary day – that Ma had pain. Early in her marriage, she had a case of hemorrhoids that was so painful, she said, “It hurt to wiggle a finger.” Much later, she had sciatica. Do you remember the jar of hot grease breaking in her hands? There must have been other things, too. But she didn’t complain. Recently, as a result of a fall in the memory care center, she broke her shoulder. One of the female siblings told me of this, dear brother. She said in her message that Ma never said a word about the pain. How did the German people stand the hellish physical anguish of the War? Look to Ma.

Among the German population of the War, even those who were not injured and whose loved ones were not killed, how did they endure the sufferings of their fellow citizens? One of the earliest memories I have is of waking in the morning with a terrible headache. I was three or four – screaming and crying. Ma handed me a glass of water – I recall it so vividly – and walked away. The worst injury I had growing up was an ingrown toenail. It went on for a year, hurting constantly. At one point it got infected. I recall taking off my shoe in the kitchen. Ma was there. “Oh, that stinks,” she said, and walked away. I had a badly sprained thumb – a football injury – which prompted Ma at one point, when I didn’t see, to give the injury a good squeeze. My yelling put a stop to that. There were other things – cuts, frozen toes, etc. – but I kept the injuries to myself. How did the German people get through the suffering they witnessed? Look to Ma.

The German civilians knew about the Holocaust. It was spoken of behind the hand. And yet, right to the end – and even for years after the War: the Resistance was regarded as treachery – the Germans supported the damn lunatic and his phalanx of soulless, subhuman nutcases. How could they? Ma sat in the kitchen while her daughters screamed beneath the swatting of the old man, an enraged maniac, in the living room. To my knowledge, not a word of consolation was ever forthcoming, and no apology ever crossed her mind, much less her lips. How could the Germans look away from the horrors? Look to Ma.

College Years

When I was in college, the depression, of course, continued. Moreover, in my freshman year I developed an eating disorder. When I was at college I didn’t eat more than a minimum necessary to go on living – perhaps 500 calories a day. I recall so well that the skin on my stomach was like the skin on my wrist. At home on breaks, on the other hand, I ate gluttonously – perhaps 15,000 calories a day. I would wake in the morning with an aching stomach from having the muscles of my gut stretched. Interestingly, I never vomited. Perhaps you could tell me what all this repre-sented, dear brother. When I came home for Thanksgiving that first year, I was skin and bones. Ma didn’t notice, the old man didn’t notice, the siblings didn’t notice. Why, dear brother, I strongly insist upon it – that family was not close!

Once, in my sophomore year, Ma came to get me at the college. We stopped at a restaurant on the way home. Mistake number two – I reached out to her again. This time, she wasn’t upset. She rather enjoyed the experience. She laughed and smiled and brushed me off with statements such as “Oh, you’re just too sensitive,” “You have to be tougher than that,” and the predictable, “Stop feeling that way.” At least she was happy. I didn’t enjoy the meal. She was delighted. I vowed never to make that mistake again, and I didn’t.

Something switched inside my troubled brain. The eating disorder ended after a year – not being a female probably had something to do with it – and the depression abated at least to the extent that I began to study in earnest. I would have lengthy bouts of pain, but I learned to walk a lot to alleviate the hurt. The old man was happy with my progress; I once headed home to blow him away with a shotgun, but never got close. With a very hard effort I got through four years of college, just short of graduation (the old man complained; I hung up on him).

My relationship to Ma changed during my college years. Do you imagine, dear brother, that throughout our relationship I was her son? Oh, no, you are wrong there. From my sophomore year in college forward, I was her boyfriend. There were games of “I’m so desirable,” and “I’m hard to get,” and “We have something between us, don’t we?” (More about this later.) The following phone conversation was repeated many times, with slight variations: The old man: “Here, wait, I’ll get your mother. You can talk to her.” He goes away from the phone, then returns, “Oh, she says she’s too busy with something. You can talk to her when you get home.” Perhaps she was wiping the countertops.

Vietnam

Off to Vietnam. I have always liked my mother’s youngest sister. Thus, it came as a pleasant thought to me – as pleasant as the circumstances would allow – that I could stop to see her for a couple days at her home in San Francisco before going to Travis Air Force Base for debarkation to Vietnam. Without my knowledge – she had a way of doing these things – Ma insinuated herself into the trip. (Do you see, dear brother, how ludicrous, how bizarre life can be? She was coming along for my benefit – as a comfort and support for me.) I enjoyed the conversation with my aunt, who is vastly more intelligent than Ma. Ma, for her part, feeling the conversation soar over her head, did not appreciate getting less attention than she had bargained for. She was mad. Furthermore, dear brother – I cannot be so far off in my appreciation of the situation – on the morning that I departed – hugging my aunt good-bye at the depot – I can give the sad event no other interpretation – Ma was glad to see me go. I would no longer be between her and her sister. That the conversation, no doubt, diminished greatly when I was out of the picture, is beside the point. The point is, I was to sit for a long time in a small room, waiting to begin processing for departure to a war zone in the infantry, while Ma, there can be no doubt, driving off with her sister – she would spend some days there – was glad to get rid of me. A year is too long, the circumstances were too uncertain, for me to think, I’ll get through this. There are times when one cannot simply lower ones head and bull ones way through. It was a rough patch in my life.

I made it through the war, largely unscathed, with minor physical injuries, which healed, and some lasting mental scars, but not so much, really. When life is a hard struggle even war takes a back seat in its psychic depredations. Besides, war is over-hyped. Many people in civilian life go through horrors worse than combat. Growing up in our family was certainly a tougher experience for me than the war was. I was glad to be home – for a few hours. Then the sinking revelation dawned on me that I was right back at the same place I had left. War or no war, I was never free of the depression. I tried to put as much distance between myself and Ma and the old man as I could. Ma was not happy that her boyfriend was not attentive to her.

Marriage and Afterwards

Eventually, I would get married (my wife worked real hard to bring that unfortunate relationship about: I don’t understand women). The marriage lasted six years. There would be no kids (thank God!). I would initiate the divorce. Ma, in the meantime, had found the great love in her life – a large and cumbersome motor home, which the old man quickly grew to hate. Nothing more suited Ma’s personality than that contraption. She loved to fuss over it. I can still hear her exclamations to me, “I can’t believe I have it. Sometimes I think it’s a dream. I have to pinch myself to realize that it’s true.” It was. The old man once sat outside tiredly telling me how much he hated it – “It’s so confining. We’re always in each other’s way. Why couldn’t she like jewelry or something…” The only thing he and I ever agreed on was our assessment of that damn motor home. – Ma insisted my wife and I take it for a short trip right after the wedding. My wife hated it almost as much as I did.

I’ve always been a runner. I’m not coordinated, but I love physical activity. Running and bike riding, requiring little coordination, are my favorites. I’ve run two marathons. One weekend, after the divorce, I came home from the city and got up Sunday morning for a long run. After going sixteen miles, I came in to the kitchen where Ma and two or three of the siblings were having breakfast. Enlivened by the run, I chattered to the company for some time before going downstairs to take a shower. The old man (dead by now: the drinking got him) had had a shower installed off the laundry room. When I came out of the shower, there stood Ma by the washer, gawking at me. Her boyfriend… I ducked back into the shower. If you knew Ma, dear brother, as I do, you would not make a major matter of this. It was just a little titillation. But somewhat inappropriate, don’t you think? Later that day, when Ma was within earshot, I mentioned this odd behavior to the youngest female sibling – “Did you know that your mother is a voyeur?” Ma smiled embarrassedly; the sibling was completed unruffled – “Oh, is she?” she said. I’ll never understand that family.

I might note in passing that the measure of the grief is the measure of the love. My old man was buried on a Tuesday. By Friday of that week, I was over the grief. I’m surprised it lasted that long.

The hardest blow my mother ever absorbed in her life came not when the motor home broke down for good – I honestly don’t remember her reaction to that sad turn of events – but when the old man died. Not, to be sure, during the time of dying (his liver was rotted from alcohol), or during the days following the funeral, either (she imagined her kids would flock to her support: it didn’t happen, at least not with regards to her boyfriend), but not long after that, when she came to the sad and hard realization that for the first time in seventy-five years she was alone. She made it. Until her brain began to fade to darkness, she carried on, finding lots of company and even some joy in life. I was happy for her.

Am I so unusual? I can almost hear you: “Oh, that Pat, he’s just so sensitive.” Really? A year after the old man died, I visited my older sister in her home out west. In the company of a sibling, and a woman, I was wont to find something nice between us to say about our late, unlamented father. In our first conversation over the kitchen table, my older sister would only say, “I don’t miss him.” This is not much, but I could get no more out of her. In a second conversation, she was more expansive. She said, in effect, “Good riddance.” Well, this was not what I was angling for, but those were my thoughts exactly. Still, I was inclined to think, “This is a tough cookie.” No wonder she hates him, I thought, further, remembering standing in the hallway, inside the back door, listening to her screaming in the living room as the old man swatted her around for coming home late from a dance. Hers was a proud courage. (By the way, dear brother, Ma was in the kitchen at this time, sitting at the table, perhaps thinking, “It’s not happening. It’s not happening.” See how I give her credit?) I asked my older sister if she remembered being slapped by the old man on another occasion for having the temerity as a thirteen-year-old to mention his drinking – “Gee, dad, you sure do drink a lot.” “It’s like it happened yesterday,” she said, staring at me with her mouth open. How different am I? You do remember the cut lip, don’t you?

I have long thought that my older sister did not understand her relationship to the old man. As the oldest daughter, and a young woman way ahead of her years, it fell to her, in effect, to raise him. Her role was to soothe, pacify and support him (he was hurting: for reasons I won’t go into, I’m convinced he was sexually abused), to be, in effect, his mother. The German poet Rilke comes to mind here: “Perhaps that which you fear the most, in its essence, only needs your help and wants your love.” That surely applies to the old man. And what kind of help and love did my older sister give to him? None – worse, she threatened him. Kids reflect on their parents. My old man was obsessed with being exposed as a wicked pervert (remember the abuse). My older sister was not a shrinking, shy flower. There were boys. Lots of boys. Sometimes, looking back, I can almost feel sorry for the old man. And, by the way, where was Ma in all this? The old man was never as stupid as I was at seventeen and nineteen in reaching out to her. She did the cooking, cleaning and laundry. He didn’t always like the meals – “All this hullabaloo for a lousy meal,” he once said.

On Love

In a loving family, loving parents shower love, like a gentle springtime rain, on the kids. The kids, in turn, promote the growth of each other. I have seen it time and again in life. It is the most beautiful thing. In light of that ideal beauty, when the family is emotionally malformed and distorted, it is all the uglier. Recently, coming away from a visit with my older brother, I was struck by the thought – which I have never had before – that I have no more feeling for him than I would have for a stranger, someone I have never met. If a stranger fell of a heart attack, say, outside my house, I would do everything I could to help him. I would accompany him to the hospital, I would visit him there if he wanted, I would stay in touch with him if he wanted. It is just what I would do for my brother, no more and no less. This is, as I see it, the legacy of our parents.

The problem, dear brother, extends to all the relationships in the family. I can see no more closeness of the siblings to each other than of them to me. When I was forty-five, in a desperate attempt to side-step the depression of the Old Pain, I determined to sever the relationship of me to Ma (recall that the old man was dead by then). I told her as much in a firm, but not abusive, letter. For six years I was out of the family. Though I had said nothing of cutting myself off from the siblings – I had no intention of doing that – for six years none of you made the slightest attempt to get in touch with me. Not so much as a call on Christmas. A family that grows without love behaves like a family without love. Should I then, dear brother, visit Ma out of some obligation to you and the others? Let’s let further comment on that go.

For a child it all gets down to nurturing and love. Isn’t that right, dear brother? Well, I can remember none of that – not just a little, but none at all. What is love, you ask? Oh, brother, brother… “Hey, kid, come here and sit next to me and tell me about your day, because I’m interested in you…” “Come outside with me, kid, let’s take a walk, just you and me, we’ll look at the moon and the stars…” “Hey, kid, did I tell you that I love you today. I do – a lot…” Maybe your memory is better than mine, dear brother, but I can recall none of that. None – from the old man or Ma. None.

I see the results of the parenting in all the siblings. A mere mention of the old man’s hitting freezes the attention of the siblings around a table at a family gathering. And there are lingering problems – an inability to recover quickly from emotional setbacks on the part of a brother, a repeated series of psychosomatic problems afflicting a sister, psychological counseling for another, and so forth. But they carry on, visiting Ma – as they would visit the old man were he alive – just as if she were the cream of mothers. They do it for themselves, creating the family they would have wanted to have. I don’t understand people.

The blessed majority, that has the capacity for forgetting, can pretend to have loving relationships. But I cannot. I remember too much. It is a curse. But what can I do?

There is a measure of irony here, dear brother. The one person who cared about the family, truly cared, the one person who would have found a way to stay in touch with me when I was estranged from the family, that person was the old man. I have no doubt about it – “Someone stay in touch with Paddy,” he would have said, “and let me know how he’s doing.” Ma, no doubt after some spirited talk with one or more of my siblings, only sent me a note, which was a model of puffed-up self-satisfaction and puerile put-downs – “Patrick, please stop hurting yourself… You’re just being too sensitive… I’m sure the family would welcome you back with open arms…” It is all the heart she had to offer an estranged son.

I miss the old man. I wish he had lived longer. I’d have liked him much more than you, dear brother, and the rest of that poor clan. Good-bye.

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About the author: Pat O'Regan is a free-lance writer of novels, articles and short stories. After a two-year stint as a college instructor, Pat worked for many years as a business writer, while pursuing a love of writing on the side (and sometimes in the bathroom at work). His novel ("Shadows of the Past") can be had at his web-site -- PEORegan.com -- and three books of short stories are at Lulu.com. The latest collection is called "The Nun and Other Stories."

Email Pat: Patxtra@aol.com

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