Into the Wilderness: Story 55
A close family member and I have not spoken in almost 20 years. His children are adults with careers. He looks as he always did with less hair and a slightly bigger paunch. His wife— forgive me— looks like his mother. She hasn’t aged well, though it could be the country-home, trad wife hair and dress style more than anything. I wonder sometimes— rarely— if he and his wife are happy. I had heard at one time that a rift between them existed. I don’t think that was true.
I could find out easily just by calling him up. But I don’t want to. I stepped away from this relationship long ago and no change has occurred to bring me back.
As is typical with many families, what broke our relationship for good was death: my father’s death. We had gathered at my father’s home for final goodbyes. My dad, suffering from the devastating end of pancreatic cancer, was immobile and unaware, save for one phrase he repeated. “I’m not going to make it,” he said over and over. My sister and I who had cared for him the last six weeks of his life— and my sister had cared for him much longer— thought he was referring to the pancreatic cancer itself: he wasn’t going to beat it. Only at 1a.m. on the day he died did we realize. He had tried to time his passing on the same day our mother had died sixteen years earlier. Ever stubborn, he had missed it by a few hours. Since he was already in a coma by June15, the same day of our mother’s passing, I grant him his wish. As far as I am concerned, he died on June 15 as she did. The few extra hours in the transition state after midnight were not hours of life. They were moments of transmuting from one state of being to an ephemeral dimension we alive know little about.
I can’t recall if my now-estranged family member were there for the final moments. I do recall my sister and me standing by his hospital bed, holding his already cold hands, encouraging him to release this world to be with Mama. I imagine she was beyond our visual field waiting for him. I hope so at least.
I do remember the funeral home coming to retrieve his body. My family member was with us then. I know this because as we walked the stretcher with my dad’s emaciated body to the hearse, he asked my sister, “when do we review the will?” This question wrenched my sister and me from the exhaustion of caring for a dying person and our grief. One of us said, “we can’t even think of that now.”
I should have seen this question as a warning of troubles to come. I didn’t actively do so. People grieve in unique ways. The dissociation of the practicality of reviewing documents could be a distraction from the emotional tsunami of loss. The mind says, focus on the knowable and tangible, not on the gut ache of another parent and relative gone. After all, my sister and I were now parent-less. Both parents had passed earlier than they should have— mom at 54 of ALS and dad at 79 of pancreatic cancer. Both had suffered.
Months later, when the post-death clean-up began, the issues emerged. My family member questioned my dad’s will and certain decisions and divisions. I remember when my dad was ill but still mobile and seemingly ok, he wanted those of us living in other states, to understand his plans for money distribution. He put a spreadsheet on his computer screen and talked us through it. That was enough for me. My sister, an attorney, would be the executor of my dad’s estate. I trusted her. I glanced through the spreadsheet and thanked my father for the transparency. I left the room, ready to focus on being together rather than numbers. My family member, however, examined the spreadsheet for at least 45 minutes more. Even then, before my father had died, I thought this odd. What was he looking for?
Then, months after June 15, and my sister carefully following the will’s instructions, my family member’s discontent bloomed. He had expected to receive a parcel of land upon which my father’s cattle were inoculated and gelded every spring. Throughout childhood, I would stand in the big picture window of the shabby ranch house by the lake two hours from our actual home and watch the cowboy’s work. Astride their horses, they performed a choreographed routine, sweeping the cattle into pens which filtered them into a single line and then a single pen in which the enormous vaccine injection and the snip snip of the boy calf’s testicles occurred in seconds before a “get along, doggie,” and the calf was pushed back into the clover-over-grown pasture. The flies buzzed around the calves lashes and too big bulging wet eyes. Their tails swatted them away.
This land, my mother believed, should go to the family member. My sister and I would gain the depreciating value of possessions— some jewelry, china, crystal. My father disagreed, however, and specified the land be split. We don’t know why. My dad had never spoken about his desires.
My mother had already disbursed some of her treasures. As the daughter who cared for her mom for 30 months, I received her Waterford crystal collection. This gift, and others, suddenly became debate topics. The final break was a snail— a tiny pottery snail my sister had kept. It had zero value other than its place in my mother’s kitchen, along with a few other mini animals— a rabbit and two quail. My family member’s wife believed this snail traced a trail to uncounted treasures secreted away in the months preceding my father’s death. In truth, the snail only slithered to another windowsill much like the one it had sat on at my mother’s house— and nothing else. No hidden treasure-room existed, unless memories count as cathedrals of wealth. Alas, their value is in the mind and not a ledger.
After several investigations with no findings of wrongdoing, the family bond was broken. I asked him to apologize. He never did. We haven’t spoken since save for one inquiry about a remaining unsold insignificant parcel of land. When his name appeared on my phone screen, I thought, “at last.” Yet, it turned out to be transactional once again.
How did I never see that my family member’s love was always a disbursement in return for something else? He had often called me crazy, my depression and family drama nothing more than theatrics and hysteria. I remember his shock when a family member came forward to validate my claims. I wasn’t crazy after all. It was exactly as I had remembered.
I have my own faults. His son is allergic to peanuts. Once when he was visiting my father without his family, I made my daughter a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. As an easily-digestible, high protein food, the hospice nurse encouraged us to feed it to my father, which we did. We always had the house professionally cleaned before my family member and his family visited. His son had never gotten sick from my father’s house. When I made the PB&J for my daughter, however, my family member was deeply offended. He saw the action as disrespectful, even when I told him that we fed our father peanut butter all the time. I was not intending to offend, but I should have been more sensitive to the issue. I did apologize many times.
My sister is my only remaining family member— at least that’s what I say. I feel no other familial connection, no loss of relationship, no stickiness of heart. My family member no longer exists to me in any tangible way. He lived on the edges of my childhood and early adulthood. He receded further during the maturity of my remembering. Another step and he disappeared down a corridor of memory, growing smaller and smaller until no speck of being remained. No empty place exists as it does with my parents. Their loss persists in life and dreams, on days when I say, “I need to ask mom about…” before realizing I can’t and at night when they live in REM.
My story is shared by many families broken by death and financial distribution. How remarkable that moments of suffering and need result in alienation and isolation. We should cleave together rather than pull apart.
What if he did return, this prodigal relation who forsook two sisters for a jealous wife perceiving ten-cent ceramic snails as symbols of wealth? I have no capacity for grudges. I have no resentment. I simply feel nothing. Can a relationship be built out of material that was never there? I think not. His motives would always be unclear to me- both now and 20 years ago. In the end, I doubt connection can be rekindled. After all, a house imagined is not a house built.
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