Post Script #3: Finding Empathy

A person who is both my oldest friend and newest acquaintance read the paragraph in my "Life and Times..." memoir about how my father tried to observe Christmas day rituals three days after my mother died. (My father gave my sister and I gifts that he said my mother had picked out beforehand - maybe before she went into the hospital for the last time.)

The old/new acquaintance noted how sad it was and wondered if my father and I ever talked about that Christmas. An obvious comment - the kind any sensitive, empathetic person might make.

But it had never did occurred to me - not until this person pointed it out. And even then I might not have felt anything if my own wife had not died and I had not realized how bad you can feel.

Back then, consumed by my own pain and anger I never saw my father's pain (hell, I never even felt my own pain - just a sort of dead unease). The night I found him in his room drunk and crying I had no sympathy for what had taken him to that place. My only concern was that he would go off on a binge and leave me by myself (not me and my sister, just me - my self-absorption was that consuming.)

Also, until my wife died I did not understand what might have driven him to take that job in West Palm Beach. Granted he did need better employment. (He had given up a good position in Troy to return to Shelby so that my mother could die among friends and family.) But there were other closer places. Until recently I didn't understand the desperation that might drive a man to get away from everything. As my sister astutely observed (after we became friends and started talking) it was perhaps odd that he even took us with him. There were various relatives who would have taken us in.

And until I experienced the loneliness of an empty house, I assumed that all my father and my stepmother had was an arrangement. I thought he only wanted her because he needed someone to help raise my 13-year old sister and she only wanted him because he offered a way out of her brother-in-law's house (even if it meant moving to Florida to live with three strangers). And true enough I never saw any expressions of deep affection, or heard any significant conversation. But as suggested above, I was perhaps not the best observer, lacking the requisite sympathy and empathy. In their 23 years they shared the same bedroom, at least until she got sick. They went to church, took vacations, did things together, and when he started making some real money, enjoyed modest wealth. She provided good food, a nice house, and a gentle woman's presence and companionship - he provided adventure and excitement - in other words his own grandiose self.

So that is maybe something good coming from all this - that I can see things I didn't see before.

Note: In the above I do not mean to suggest that my step-mother's brother-in-law was a bad man or that he did not treat her well. It was simply that she was a guest in another family's house and my father gave her an opportunity to have her own family. Also, to flesh out that story, she and my father had known one another when they were young. I don't know what he thought about her back then - she had been pretty - but she remembered seeing him riding into town on a white horse - literally a man on a white horse.