Category Archives: impossible letters

Impossible letter #2 background (conclusion)

So you’re a smart, good looking young woman who has modeled herself after her dominant father, but living in a world of aggressively sexist assholes.  You can’t walk down the street in NYC in the 1970s and 1980s, without these assholes making wolfish comments, giving you the entitled, liplicking asshole looks that make your blood boil.   What you need is a strong, loyal man by your side to kick anyone’s ass who tries this shit with you.

That much is not hard to understand.  The requirements for this guy, aside from size and imposing physical strength, are similar to our father’s requirements for his mate:  good looking, charming, smart, good sense of humor, devoted and ready to do whatever I say.

Then we face the law of unintended consequences.  She found this man, a handsome, athletic giant, who told her he was separated from his wife when their whirlwind romance began.  He would do anything for her, wanted to sweep her away to Arizona, start a new life in Tucson.  She was a New Yorker with friends and a good job, not ready for this radical new start.   He eventually got divorced and they eventually got married.  He was good looking, smart, strong and devoted to making her happy.  The unintended part, unseen, and once seen, rationalized: the guy was sometimes a bit of a compulsive liar and probably a gambling addict.

What did he lie about?  His academic degrees, his former employment, money, why he lost his job, why he needed to borrow more money, why he couldn’t pay back the money he’d borrowed, why he came home with his clothes sliced to rags and his wallet and keys gone, why he lied about a previous lie, why taking that merchandise from his boss and selling it under the table wasn’t actually stealing, why shoplifting really isn’t stealing, why pretending to go to work every day for a year while taking cash advances on your dead father’s credit cards and handing them to your wife every week as your pay is really a victimless crime and so on.

Bottom line, he was bad with money.  At one point he made an excellent living, selling a lucrative yet legal product, but he also spent lavishly, extravagant orders and generous tips at restaurants, many expensive gifts and then, bad news, after a couple of years of living large, a few years scraping by, he finally had to declare bankruptcy.   

He did this a few days after borrowing ten thousand dollars from his father-in-law, the DU, for last minute expenses related to the upcoming closing on the dream house he and his wife were about to buy.  A lovely home with a beautiful back yard, where their soon–to–be born son would grow up playing with his big sister.  The guy was a practiced liar with the gift of looking disarmingly sincere, and vulnerable, when he lied.  He borrowed the ten grand from the DU on Monday, waited for the check to clear.  On Friday he told everyone he couldn’t repay the loan or buy the house, he’d declared bankruptcy earlier that week.

All of these details are humiliating to have set out in front of you, granted.  The only other option is to dummy up about all of it, as he always pressured me to do, about things like his refusal to pay me back money I’d loaned him, back when I still spoke to him. 

The vow of silence on sore subjects required to maintain a sociable relationship includes a big IXNAY on any mention of the death threat when his wife finally called him out about his psychopathic untruthfulness.  

To be fair, the death threat was a one off.  The wife flew into a long overdue rage that had been building for years, after the surprise bankruptcy that ended the charade of closing on the never to be attained dream home.  He angrily shot back that he was going to lock her and the kids in the house (I think a bicycle lock and a piece of heavy machinery came into play in this threat to seal them inside– my nephew had been born by then, was a young baby) get in his car, drive the mile to his in-laws, murder both of them with their biggest kitchen knife, come home, kill the children and set the house on fire, burning himself and his wife to death. 

In fairness to him, he never did any of this, although the graphically detailed threat got everybody’s attention for a while. 

The little family was also teetering on the edge of bankruptcy number two and I offered to look over the family budget, see where they could make cuts to save money.  

There was no family budget, no accounts or receipts except for ones showing the interest rates paid by poor people who buy luxury items, like a giant flat screen TV, on the predatory terms imposed in payment plans.  I reacted badly to the obscene interest rates that doubled the price of the giant flat screen they were still paying for, years after buying it. I see now, thinking about it again, that it had to have been humiliating to be made to feel bad for just trying to live a decent life.

“You have to explain to your kids why you’re so angry at your husband, otherwise all they see is an irrationally angry mother always grim and stressed out, for no apparent reason,” I told my sister.   She wasn’t ready to reveal any of this, assured me her kids had no idea that she was so angry at their father.  I assured her that they were well aware of it.  

For one thing, she’d been sleeping with her young son, in his bed, for several years, until the kid threw her out one night, old enough to point out the obvious and say “this is weird, mom.”   

“They do know,” she told me one day, not long afterwards.   She’d been at the kitchen sink and heard the kids out front talking to the neighbors’ kids.  She’d heard them describe how much their dad loves their mom, but that their mom doesn’t love their dad.

I offered to be in the room when her husband explained to the kids why mommy had a right to be mad at daddy sometimes, as he’d promised her he’d do, at my urging.  Daddy, it should be pointed out, was always playful, gentle and affectionate with the kids, their best friend.  Mommy could be demanding, grim and dreaded if crossed, but daddy was a giant, humorous, always a loving pussy cat.  He loved to cuddle

I was in Florida for two weeks and offered to help my sister inform the kids of some of the reasons she’d been angry at their loving dad.   She agreed, but kept putting me off, in the end assuring me that he’d promised to talk to the kids with her, as soon as I left Florida.  No warning I could have given her would have made any difference.

A week after I got back to New York my mother called me.  “You’d better call your sister, I just heard from her, today was the day that R____ was going to tell the kids about his sordid past, it didn’t go well.  She’s driving a hundred miles an hour on 95, I’m afraid she’s going to crash her car.”

My sister, who was indeed very upset, told me the story.  Her husband started his mea culpa to the children by putting things in context for them.  “You know how your mother has a hard time forgiving people sometimes?  Well, years ago I made a little mistake…” and, as if proving his point about what an unforgiving monster their mother was, she exploded, raced out the door, gunned the engine and started speeding on the highway.

There are things in life you cannot fix, irreparably broken things you had no hand in breaking.  No amount of nuance you can provide will change a black and white world view into a gradient where everyone strives for the best, with needed compromise along the way.  In the world of someone who must win, and always be in control, everything must be viewed in terms of victory or defeat.  

Defeat is the most humiliating thing in the win/lose world and the fierce competitor will do anything necessary to avoid the shame of losing.  You can continue to love people, you can be willing to compromise, do your best to be supportive, understanding, accepting — bear in mind, none of this shit will help you when you are trying it with someone in conflict who can never be on the losing end of anything.

Mistakes.  These wrong things you accuse me of doing are simple human mistakes, when I make them.  When you do bad things, you evil fuck, well, you are completely in the wrong.  But my mistakes are merely the mistakes of an imperfect person with no hurtful intention behind them, you merciless, hypocrite fuck.

Get into a wrestling match with an alligator and you get what you get, sucka.

After my mother’s funeral in 2010 we were standing on Mott Street in Chinatown, on a sweltering, humid NYC evening.  Me, Sekhnet, my sister and my niece, sucking on cold bubble teas in the elbow of Mott Street.  My niece was about twenty at the time.  We were exchanging stories about this high strung woman, the older sister of the high school friend at whose house my sister and niece were staying.  The woman, a doctor, really was a bit of a cartoon character, a female Yosemite Sam.  I listened to a few funny stories and told about the one time I met her.   

Her brother and I had arranged to meet at a Queens restaurant he’d been raving about, his brother and sister would be there with him.  I sent him an email saying I was unlikely to be done with work in time to join them at the appointed hour, but that they should have appetizers and I’d hop on a train and be there as soon as I could.   I got there about thirty minutes after the appointed time.  They were sitting in a car in front of the restaurant, which was closed.   This was before the age when everyone had a smart phone in their pocket, and besides, I’d been on the subway for the previous half hour.   A woman stuck her head out of the front passenger seat and angrily told me that I was an inconsiderate fucking asshole.  I said “nice to meet you, Ellen”.

“But if you really want to hear stories about her, ask your father,” I said to my beautiful, smiling niece  “he knows her best of all, they were married.”

My sister made a desperate throat slash/ixnay IXNAY!!! gesture behind her confused daughter’s back.  I had no idea the father’s previous marriage and divorce was a deeply guarded family secret.  My niece opened her eyes wide and looked from me to her mother, back to me, back to her mother, totally confused.

“Mom, what?!   Was dad really married to her?”

My sister assured her that dad had never been married to her.  I stood in the street, at a loss for words.  I should have not been at a loss for words, and I rarely am, I must not have been ready for nuclear war with my sister at that moment.   She’d already nuked one of my major cities, true, by insisting that Uncle Elie was either crazy or a liar, or both, but I stood in the street, not ready to launch my counterattack.  I don’t operate that way, blasting first and cleaning up afterwards, for all of my skill at disemboweling desperate enemies with my sharp tongue.

As soon as I was alone with my sister I told her she had to straighten things out with my niece.  She had hammered an intolerable wedge between me and the niece I loved.  My niece now had to consider if her uncle was insane or just a compulsive liar who couldn’t help himself from spewing whatever gibberish came into his head.  My sister told me she understood, and she’d talk to her daughter, explain everything.   

Of course, there were a lot of conditions placed on that talk — both kids had to be informed at the same time (what this had to do with my nephew, who wasn’t there, was never explained) and they had to be informed at a time when their father wasn’t there, which he always was.  It would be tricky, she told me, but she’d do it as soon as possible.

I know what you must be thinking, dear reader, now that I’ve set out this story for you with the full illumination of hindsight.  “You know how your uncle is sometimes really angry and unable to forgive people who didn’t actually do anything to him?”

A year later, the next time we saw each other, my sister told me that she’d tried to keep her promise, but that the time had never been right to tell the kids what she’d promised to tell them, without their father there.  Seriously, though, looking at it in the context of the rest of this, how did I not yet understand the world my sister lived in?  I wasn’t ready to let her and her children go, couldn’t admit to myself that they were probably already gone.

When our father was dying, during the last night of his life, I asked him to record a little message for his daughter, in the event that they didn’t get a chance to speak before the end.   He hesitated for a long time, and everything he said afterwards applied to himself as much as to his daughter.  

Except that, naturally, he started off by saying he could never understand how she could stay with that colossal asshole after all the times he’d betrayed and lied to her.  I told him that his views on the subject were well known to everyone, but that perhaps he had something of a more helpful nature he wanted to say to her, before time ran out.  He had a very hard time formulating anything I could play for her.  

“No matter how much you praise her, it makes no difference, her need for affirmation is a bottomless pit,” said the brilliant man who’d insisted, moments earlier, that he’d been the dumbest Jewish kid in Peekskill — “by far!”. 

“I must I must have told her a hundred times what a phenomenally talented teacher she was, but it never made the slightest impression on her. It’s like a bottomless hole that can’t be filled.” said my father, a bottomless hole that couldn’t be filled, on the last night of his life.

“A hundred times?,” I said, not able to let that bit of dishonest hyperbole go, not in our last conversation. 

“Easily a hundred,”  he said. It was probably once, perhaps it was even twice, whatever it was it wasn’t a hundred fucking times. I let it go, aware that I was in his temple, the room he was dying in.

“His life was shame-based,” my sister said after he died.  “His whole life was an attempt to avoid feeling unbearable shame.”

Set and match, if you pattern yourself after someone you admire, in spite of the tremendous damage he did.

I went into a fury when my sister told me she hadn’t had a chance to set her daughter straight, claiming that since it was already a year ago that the kid probably had no memory of it anyway. When I blew up,  my sister burst into tears.  She sobbed like a little kid, I’ve never seen an adult cry that way.  She stood on the street, bawling and shuddering for a long time.  Then she promised again that she’d tell her kids that she’d lied, that their uncle hadn’t been crazy or lying when he casually mentioned an objective, taboo fact.

“Hi, Uncle Elie,” my niece said over the phone a week or two later.  “My mom wanted me to call to tell you that she told us that our dad was married and divorced before my parents got married.”

“Did she tell you why I needed her to tell you this?”

“No, we were both kind of confused about why it was so important to you…” she said.

“A hundred million people have been divorced, people get divorced all the time.  Why would I give a shit about you knowing that your father had been divorced?” I said.

“We were wondering the same thing,” she said.

I told her the story.  She’d forgotten all about it, just as her mom had predicted.  When I finished the story she said “now I understand why you were so upset.”

That may have been the last time I spoke on the phone with my smart, beautiful niece.  Ten years later, after periodic texts exchanged, with many heart emojis, I finally set out to write the impossible letter, to her and her brother.

Impossible letter #2 — background

The impossible letter, I understand now, is any letter written to influence somebody who has unquestioning, unreasoning belief.  The greatest letter you can conceive will not change deeply held beliefs, unless the heart of the recipient is already inclined toward what you have to say.  It’s natural to suspect a nefarious motive when you receive an attempt to persuade you of something you’re not inclined to accept, coming from someone you’ve been warned against.   A charming, personal letter from Hitler, no matter how beautifully written, would have little chance of changing my mind about anything.

Impossible letter number two was written to my only two living blood relatives, my niece and nephew.   I was disappointed, but not entirely surprised, to have no response from either of them.   The back story is long and complicated, though also simple and straightforward.

The roots of this insoluble impasse to-the-death, like most things of a deadly emotional nature, are in long-ago childhood.  I have avoided writing directly about this particular tangled emotional web but at this point my need to set things out is greater than my need to be senselessly discreet.   When you’re forbidden to talk about things, and they continue to bother you, the most obvious option, for those who sit down every day to write, is to write them out.   To me clarity is a much better option than blind emotional commitment to a strong, unreasoning feeling.   If you’re like me, the impossible letter eventually begins to take shape in your head, you imagine the clear telling that will set everything straight, in a perfect world.

In the home my sister and I grew up in, our father dominated our mother.   Dad “won”, mom “lost” — she always compromised, he almost never did.  Our mother was smart, quick on her feet, funny, competent, sociable, a better driver than our father, adroit at solving mysteries, but she always deferred to her strong-willed husband during the hollering matches we had with our dinner almost every night.   She bent to whatever he needed, always took his side, out of love, loyalty, sympathy, knowing how badly he needed to be right, fear, weakness, conditioning, lack of confidence, variable self-esteem, a housewife’s expected fealty to her husband in the 1960s, some combination of all of the above.  Our father was upset almost every evening, exhausted by working two jobs and the monstrous ingratitude of his two spoiled, mean-spirited children.  He flew into a rage easily and in his rage was never without righteousness on his side.  He was rightfully known as the DU, The Dreaded Unit, my sister’s perfect name for him.

My sister paid me a great compliment once, when we were young adults.  We were sitting in a Dunkin’ Donuts in south Florida.  She asked me why I wasn’t like either one of our parents.  I told her that if those were the only two options in life, to become one of our deeply damaged parents, I’d have long ago snuffed myself.  I asked her why she thought those were the only two choices.  I had no understanding then of how inexorably our childhood had marked my sister’s life, limiting her choices to modeling herself after a winner or a loser, righteous dominance or humiliating submission.

“I’m the DU,” she told me somberly, shortly after her second child was born.   She fixed me with a terribly poignant look that shook me as much as her statement.

“No, wait, that can’t be, you can’t… you have to do something about that.  You need to talk to somebody, you need to do some work, you can’t replicate what was done to us.  You don’t want to inflict that kind of damage on your children.  You can’t do that to them, come on, they’re totally innocent.   What are you going to do?  You’ve got to nip this shit in the bud.”

“Being the DU means you can’t do anything about it,” she said. 

Decades later I understand that if you are damaged enough to see the world as black and white, win or lose, pride or crushing shame, with nothing in between (compromise is weakness) you believe, in your core, that there is nothing you can do about it but get up every day and fight anyone who makes you feel bad about yourself.  My father always argued that people cannot change on any fundamental level.  

I understand now, only very recently, that it was a true statement for him.  Being the DU means you feel utterly powerless against your dreaded nature.  If you acknowledge that others can work and change some of the worst things about themselves, how humiliating that would be.   It’s almost like you’re choosing to be too weak to face whatever makes you live in a black and white world.

(part 2 to follow)

Conflict, to many hurt people, is a war to be won not a problem to be resolved

Some people are so hurt that, when it comes to inevitable conflict, they see it as hurt others or be hurt yourself, and take no chances. They commonly deploy a technique known as DARVO, (Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender) a reflexive strategy whenever there is conflict — make it the complete fault of the other person.   

Conflict, to this personality, is not something to be resolved, it is a war for existence itself that must be won by any means necessary.  The first rule of conflict, for those who see it as total war, is:  deny any role in the conflict and blame the merciless party you disagree with. Like so:

This conflict is entirely your creation and not my fault in any way, so you are the cause of the entire conflict and the only one who can fix it, obviously!  I need to defend myself against your unfair, sick, dangerous attacks.  I‘ve never had conflict in my life, your life is one long conflict, so the entire problem must be you, though, of course, you can’t admit that, because that would make you wrong, which you can never be.  You keep insisting I hurt you but you hurt me continually,  brutally, unfairly and without the slightest mercy or hesitation, etc.

If you think about it for a moment, the only hope of resolving a conflict is through an honest back and forth, everyone gaining a better understanding of the cause of the problem, everyone willing to compromise to make the mutual pain stop.  This takes a certain maturity and faith in the problem solving abilities of the other person in the conflict. 

Honest conversation and understanding are the last things a person who needs to “win” every conflict can tolerate.  So-called honesty is perceived as a vicious attack on vital organs!  So you use all of your powers to transform the other party into the unreasonable aggressor and recruit loyal allies in the brutal war to defend your good name against the slander that you are hell-bent on winning at any price.

Talk about your basic mindfuck.   The cherry on top is that people you have known for years, and considered close friends, could believe this simplistic and ridiculous version of events rather than the much more plausible story of what actually took place… perfectly mindfucking…

Remember the acronym DARVO — deny, attack, reverse victim and offender.  How did I go all these years with no shorthand for the consistent way every angry person who cannot be wrong that I’ve ever had a conflict with has reacted?   What is the word for the flying monkeys who believe the weaponized DARVO version of reality?   Oh, yeah, flying monkeys.   Oh wee yo…  

The price of inheritance

The price of inheritance is obedience, to the exact degree demanded.   Dissident children don’t get shit, except for furious punishment while the bequeather is still alive.   Getting nothing, and being cast out of your family, is a very high price to pay for a fleeting feeling of personal integrity.

We spent five days with old friends in a beautiful rented house near Woodstock.  At one point I was sharing my long-running painful estrangement from my niece and nephew, my only two direct blood relatives, with one of my oldest friends.  I haven’t seen either one since my mother’s funeral in 2010.  My attempts to remain in touch have been mostly futile.  Now I don’t even hear back from either one when I reach out.  My friend, at a loss for any idea we haven’t already talked about, seeing how much this seemingly insoluble situation hurts me, looked at me with sad eyes and said “that’s very painful.”   I nodded and we sat there for a minute, just acknowledging how much this kind of thing hurts.

In the case of my niece and nephew I understand what they’ve been told by my brother-in-law and his wife.  Your uncle is an insane, judgmental, vengeful, lying prick.  He stole your inheritance when your grandparents died.  He will eventually kill you, if he ever gets the chance.  He’s a person incapable of love, forgiveness and honesty, though he pontificates at unbearable length about the importance of all three.  He is the lowest form of vicious hypocrite imaginable.  Picture Hitler, only much worse.

Fast forward a year and a half.

My periodic attempts to make contact with any of my old, formerly sympathetic friend’s three adult children, all of whom I have known since birth and fondly played with all during their childhoods, as well as advised and helped as young adults . . . crickets.

My own fault, really, since I refuse to acknowledge that to some people talking about conflict, with an eye toward preventing future strife, is exactly the same as viciously attacking them in their soul.   To speak about any kind of mutual role in conflict is to blame them, 100%, when they are unshakably certain that you are 100% to blame and a very dangerous fucker too, capable of all kinds of satanic appeals to love, fairness and vulnerability, which always come at their expense.  They will explain this to their children with passion, telling them to think of Hitler, only much, much worse.

I understand now that if you have a competitive view of life, see the world as black and white, win or lose, pride or humiliation, no compromise is possible with someone who does not do what you need them to do.   That’s just the way it is.  Keep whatever you want in your heart but keep any look off your face that shows defiance of a will that needs to be right.  Have as much integrity as you want in the quiet of your own soul, but show any glint of that and we’ll cut you dead as we cut our dear, old friend, Hitler, dead.  Clear enough for you, my beloved child?

To change or not to change

This dawned on me out of the blue yesterday, as my mind intermittently tries to work out another puzzle that has never made sense to me.   I realized that someone who lives in terrifying anticipation of unbearably painful shame and humiliation lives in a different, scarier, much more threatening world than most people.   In their world, someone they love, someone their children trust, can become an implacable Adolf Hitler clone in an instant.   Think of how terrifying that world would be to live in.

I had a long running debate with my father about whether people can change or not.  I believe that people can change, particularly if repeated, reflexive  behaviors keep causing you the same pain.  My mother confirmed the best of these changes in me over the years, but I myself know how much better I handle things like frustration, anger and depression than I used to.  

Change is certainly hard, it takes a lot of work and concentration, but it is possible.  When you can finally sit with your pain without crying out, you begin to see its causes more and more clearly.  If you see how your behavior, responding to a perceived threat,  makes the problem worse, you can little by little improve how you respond.   You will see cause and effect, understand the steps in behavior that lead to the bad result, and most importantly, learn to catch yourself before you react badly.  You will do a little better over time, if you are serious enough about changing things that torment you.   To believe otherwise is to accept that we’re doomed to a life of enduring constantly repeating misery.

My father believed that people cannot, on any fundamental level, change.   His position was that if you are born with a reflex to react with anger, that’s all she wrote about your ability to ever have significantly better control of your temper.  He told me, the night before he died, that his life had been basically over by the time he was two.   

He was referring to what had happened to him in those formative pre-verbal years before he could develop any memories at all, years that were all fear and pain.  This was a subject he never spoke of, but that I discovered a few years before he died when his older cousin Eli sadly revealed it to me. 

He angrily denied everything when I began to bring it up, denounced Eli as a fucking liar, but he acknowledged it the last night of his life. 

“Whatever Eli told you,” he said, referring to the beloved older cousin he denounced as an unreliable narrator and an idiot, “he spared you the worst of it.  Nobody could ever describe the true horror of the home I grew up in.”

What was this horror?  That he grew up in soul-killing poverty and that his mother was a tiny, religious woman with a Hitler-like temper and no threshold for frustration.   Whenever she got frustrated she took it out on the giant baby who had caused her such pain coming into the world, grabbing the nearest whip and lashing him across the face.

“In the face?” I asked my cousin Eli when he told me the story of watching his beloved aunt mercilessly whipping her toddler son.  He nodded with the saddest possible expression.

To my father, we are doomed when we start, however we’re born, whatever our predispositions, genetic tendencies and earliest experiences are, that’s essentially how we will always be.  What happens, according to my father’s view, is you put together a certain social veneer, you develop a talent for making jokes, have intelligent conversations, enjoy things like college sports, you can be fascinated by history, a one-time idealist and a keen student of politics, a philosopher, even, but all that is a social construct you make to cover whatever demons are churning inside yourself that you cannot change or influence in any meaningful way.  We are doomed, as the victims of whatever trauma befell us before we could defend ourselves, and there’s nothing any of us can do about, my father believed, until the last night of his life.

“Fuck that”, was always my position.  If you suffer from a terrible temper, would it not help to understand why you get so fucking mad?  If, say, your mother had repeatedly whipped you in the face with the coarse cord of her steam iron, when you were less than two, wouldn’t that be a good reason to be a bit touchy later in life?   Or, let’s say, you first went to kindergarten with 20/400 vision, legally blind, and no adult discovered this until you were about 9, when FDR mandated that poor kids should have free eyeglasses as part of the New Deal (legislation that also outlawed child labor in the US, when my dad was already 8, working age).  Up until that time you’d been regularly mocked as a big moron for not being able to tell an A from an F on the blackboard.  Got your first pair of glasses in third grade, and went on the honor roll from fourth grade on.   These details are important to consider before condemning yourself as doomed to having an explosive temper and having been a big dummy when you were a young kid, no?

My father might have said “maybe for a novel, or some kind of rumination on human nature, but for the average person trying to get through life, support a family, work two jobs to give his children a good life after the grinding poverty of his own life, all that is more than enough to have on your plate.  Besides, no matter how many of the hideous details you relive, the pain involved in putting that puzzle together to the extent that you would be able to change anything meaningful about your life, which you know I believe one can’t, is unimaginably terrifying.   Why feel that nightmare again when we can do nothing to change our lives, in any fundamental way?”

Circular logic if there ever was an example of it.  Logic, of course, is not the right word to apply to that analysis.  Though my father was capable of sophisticated logic, and was a skilled debater capable of arguing either side of any position, this loop was not an example of any of that.  In formal debating, debaters learn to strategically deploy logos (intellectual argument based on facts and logic), ethos (moral argument) and pathos (appeals to emotion).  The inner world people like my father cannot escape from is ruled by pathos.   Have enough unbearable emotion in your soul and the greatest logical and moral arguments fall off you like rain off the proverbial duck’s back.  

I understand now that for someone like my father, wounded in his heart as deeply as he was, change was impossibly painful to even consider possible.  He simply could not imagine putting himself through the unnerving pain that would have been necessary before he could try to change.  To acknowledge that anyone else could change, but that he couldn’t, would only have added to his shame and humiliation.  His position that people cannot actually change was psychologically necessary for him because, for him, it was true.  

Logos, ethos and pathos, the only one operating full tilt, in many lives right now, is pathos.   Strong emotions rule the world in this age of Alternative Reason.  His will be done on earth, as it is in heaven.  Amen.

Fucking hell.

Impossible letter # two (prelude)

The impossibility of the letters themselves makes writing them an almost impossibly steep uphill drag.  If your words have no chance of being heard by the other person, that’s literally all she wrote. 

If it’s already been demonstrated over and over that the other person will not listen to you, why would writing those same words on paper and mailing them have a better effect?  If you know your words will never be read, or, if read, never acknowledged, or, if acknowledged, never responded to, clearly you are attempting the impossible. 

Still, there are times when the letter may begin to form itself in your mind, seem like the best idea on the subject, impossible as it also is.   One benefit of exerting yourself to write an impossible letter, of course, is setting the issues out as clearly as possible for yourself as you write.

You hit on a new angle for presenting resolution of the conflict that disrupted a long, loving relationship, say the idea of introducing death, our inevitable fate in our declining years, as a way of playing a poignant chord.  To the person who will not hear, that is merely a crude emotional ploy for undeserved sympathy.  Now you are pathetically playing the violin to try to move them to feel sorry for you, even though you don’t deserve even a hearing after the unforgivable crimes you’ve committed.

Tender memories you offer as proof of affection are cast aside as manipulation.  A factual point you make is more proof that you are a joyless reciter of biased facts to support your insane lawyerly arguments.  A gift you send need not be acknowledged to be another offensive example of this kind of dirty emotional game.

The facts won’t work, no agreement is possible about the scope or nature of the conflict, no softening of a rigidly defended position, no acknowledgment of a mutual problem — and no appeals to caring, sharing, love and sentiment.

Add those restrictions up and you get one impossible letter.  The letter itself, no matter how well you craft it, has zero chance of persuading that person of something they are programmed to reject, if you can even get the letter read.  If these letters ever are actually read, you will almost never get any acknowledgment.  In the rare case that you do, it will be to use the letter as a stick to poke you in the eye with.

A few months back I sent a letter, a last attempt to make peace, during the ten days after the Jewish New Year, days set aside for settling debts, seeking forgiveness, making amends.   I wrote this letter after my old friend, a Jew who prays at dawn every day, in the manner of the most orthodox Jews, stormed out of a restaurant a few days before Yom Kippur (the day religious Jews believe that God inscribes the future for every human for the coming year) when I “blindsided” him with a conversation about forgiveness that he didn’t want to hear, was not able to think about without becoming indignant.

A few days later I sat down and wrote him a letter I somehow didn’t yet understand was impossible.  I felt better once I’d set the thoughts and feelings down on a page.  I actually slept better right after I mailed it, the burden of fixing a long friendship suddenly turned to senseless, total war off of my shoulders.   The issues were clear enough, the letter was simple and short. The next move now belonged to my friend and his wife (I’d written and mailed a short note to her, assuring her of my love).  I had three or four nights of untroubled sleep for the first time in a year, since our sudden, traumatic falling out.  

2:45 a.m, a few days later, my phone rings.  My friend was very upset, he’d received my letter and he couldn’t sleep.  He wasn’t going to talk about anything in the letter, or what particularly upset him, but I was apparently again unfairly using my power to express myself clearly as a way to oppress him.   Close to tears he told me he’d sat down and written me long letters on at least six occasions, letters he never sent me, or even mentioned to me.  He was very hurt that I didn’t seem to appreciate that at all.  And so on.   

What do these impossible letters have in common?   They ask the reader to be fair, to consider another point of view, and the mutual hurt and damage involved, when the reader believes he has already been more than fucking fair.   Impossible letters require that the recipient hold a letter they feel is written by Hitler and read it dispassionately, calmly, open to being persuaded by Hitler’s golden words.

The common factor, I realize at my advanced age, is that all these letters involve an attempt to counter the determined narratives of people bent on never feeling humiliated again.   If terror of shame and humiliation causes a person to build and cling to a persona that can never be wrong, all perceived criticism is a deadly attack that must be repelled with overwhelming force.  An untrue statement they make is not a lie, and it is humiliating to be called a liar, they are merely defending themselves reflexively and if the truth is a sharp, deadly weapon they parry it by first denying it.   Narcissism 101, baby.

Take any story insisted on in the face of overwhelming evidence that it is not true.  The lie that Biden stole the 2020 election, with the help of many powerful traitorous Republicans, debunked 1,000 times, thrown out of every court, the fairness of the election confirmed with broad bipartisan acknowledgement.   Can a political party continue to insist that the election was stolen, that rioters were fully justified to attack police and stop the joint session of Congress to prevent the certification of a rigged election? 

They can if they’re mad as hell, and if you’re mad enough to assault police you have to believe you’re right, and if you’re right, how can you listen to fucking assholes who tell you you’re wrong?  You know what you do to them? Bash them in the fucking face.  Take away their right to vote.   Those who assaulted the cops were right to do so, the ones convicted of violence are viciously persecuted political prisoners, etc.

If you find yourself on the other side of a narcissist’s visceral terror of shame, watch your ass. In the end, the best you will be able to do is write an impossible letter to their children, trying to explain that they sre not alone, weighed down with deep, vaguely understood hurt it will take them decades to begin to understand, if ever, but that there are adults out here, willing to listen and talk, who do not share their parent’s maniacal determination to blame them for everyone’s unhappiness.

Impossible letter number one, draft two

The first impossible letter I wrote and posted recently, while currently also impossible to get to the recipient (she hasn’t yet responded to my email of eight or nine days back), suffered from a major flaw that was spotted by a friend who read it.  There was a long passage detailing my fatal falling out with her parents.   It was good for me to write, was the clearest explanation I’ve been able to give for the unresolvable conflict, but it did not belong in the letter to the daughter. 

My friend’s comment was a good reminder of the importance of a second and third set of eyes, and someone else’s life experience, on what you are working on. Precisely the input that is missing on most internet content posted by random posters.

I selected the two page section in question, cut it and pasted it as an appendix I indicated was “available on request.”  If she wants the details, she can ask.  Assuming she would ever find a reason to reply to Adolf Hitler after he brutally murdered both of her saintly parents.   Here is the rewrite, still impossible, and still with a fairly dim view of her deeply damaged parents, but with a slightly better approach,  and more readable for the changes, I think. 

Dear T:

This note will have to stand in for the conversation I’d hoped to have with you for the last fifteen years or so.  Writing to an excellent writer makes me a little more hopeful that you will take in the message I am trying to convey.

The summary version: you need to let yourself completely off the hook for harmful childhood conflicts in your family. Although the blame was generally placed on you, these conflicts were not mostly your fault.   Forgiveness is a great gift to give yourself.

I can’t recommend it highly enough and I hope to convince you how indispensable it is.  It comes, in part, from looking clearly at the past and drawing honest, merciful conclusions about life.  It follows an understanding that is often impossible to come to on our own. Hopefully you can add what I’m telling you to your understanding.

My need to tell you this was kicked into high gear a few years back when a concerned C referred me to your final piece on that website you worked for.  In that emotional essay you painted the picture of yourself as a problem child who had inflicted great harm on your family by being an asshole. Why you felt that way is understandable.  For one thing, your parents, as I have now seen up close, are pros at presenting a united and unyielding front, no matter how strong the merits of the position they are opposing are.

Making this letter a bit more ticklish to write is the indigestibly tragic fact that your parents have judged me a person unworthy of their love (I know, in their version I did that to them).  A year or two ago this letter, making a simple point about self-mercy, would have come from a beloved family friend.  Not the case today. The short history (which omits occasional thoughtless treatment and abandonment over the years that I never made an issue about) is that after a few days of an increasingly stressful Yom Kippur holiday in Woodstock, your mother lost her temper at me and your parents had to rewrite the history of fifty years of friendship (details available on request).   

As you recall, I was on the scene for your entire childhood. You were a musical prodigy.  Your parents didn’t want you to have the miserable, high-pressure life of a child star, they wanted to prevent you from possibly becoming a monster and having an unhappy adulthood.  Their solution, classical piano lessons, was not a particularly good one, but it was done with good intentions.  

I’m sure your parents were unaware that Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney (and the other Beatles), Stevie Wonder, Taylor Swift, Paul Simon, Aretha Franklin, Django, Jimi and other wonderfully creative composers (I suspect Joni, too, but couldn’t confirm it) can’t read music. Reading music, to your parents, was essential to being a competent, professional musician and songwriter.  Therefore, classical piano lessons and a succession of frustrating, frustrated, piano teachers.   Sadly, your parents didn’t understand that love of music, and playing and inventing it purely out of love, is the best way to develop a talent like yours.

You showed your genius early in life, earlier than you can remember.  I was at the dinner table at 181st Street when you sat on your dad’s lap.  Vogel was there too, and recalled this also when I reminded him of it years ago. You were a curly haired two or three year-old.  Your eyes twinkled as you got my attention across the table.  It was like you were saying “watch this, are you ready?” Then, a moment later, almost with a wink to me, you instantly sent your father into a spasm of anger.

Soon thereafter he went into therapy to learn how to avoid becoming the kind of angry, destructive parent his mother had been.  When he was satisfied he wouldn’t traumatize you the same way, he stopped therapy.

I’ll try to give you the schematic view: whatever happened to H [T’s paternal grandmother] as a girl to make her H (the dark side of her) led to her short temper with your young father, her lack of control as she slapped him hard in the face whenever she got angry.   All very bad shit, no question, terrible and inexcusable.  

I’ve told your father the story of my eventual breakthrough in therapy (aided by my father’s first cousin who gave me the heartbreaking image of my father, as a toddler, whipped in the face repeatedly by his psycho mother) that allowed me to, not exactly forgive, but come to a useful understanding.  

I came to see that my anger at my father was only hurting me (and certainly not helping him, though fuck him).  Bad as it was, he’d done the best he could.  I was still pissed, but, fortunately, I had enough emotional distance and understanding to be present and compassionate when my father was suddenly on his deathbed.  I was no longer going to reduce him to the sum of his inadequacies as a parent.  I had no case against him to argue, only sorrow.   Luckily for both of us, we had one great, decades overdue, honest conversation the last night of his life, and then he was gone.  I kept urging your father to work toward this point in his feelings about his mother, while there is time.  It is a fucking tragedy to have this kind of deathbed reconciliation and to be left thinking of all the wasted years of senseless warfare that could have been avoided by mutual forgiveness, all the love foolishly lost.  

Your father can’t forgive his mother.  As a partial result, he can’t forgive himself.  Even as he understands it comes from his mother’s irrational demands, he feels he needs to be perfect, anything less is a torment to him.  None of us are perfect. 

When we hurt people all we can do is apologize and try to make amends.  It is the same with ourselves.  When you’ve done everything possible to fix a broken relationship, for example, and nothing is helping, in the end you have to let yourself off the hook for your “failure” or you go mad, turning the anger on yourself.  The only thing to do when someone you love is truly sorry about something they did to you is to accept their apology, forgive them, as you forgive yourself.  Can’t forgive yourself?  Can’t really forgive anyone else, or love them with their faults. 

Would you have been a more prolific, protean composer if you hadn’t had those years in the straitjacket of involuntary classical piano?  Who knows.  We are all responsible for our own lives and our actions.  That’s not the same as taking the blame for things that are beyond our responsibility and ability to fix or make right. 

I was tortured for more than a year trying to make peace with your parents.  The days before the next Yom Kippur, it turned out, were not right for the honest conversation we needed to have, your father got angry that I suggested it, stormed out of the restaurant.   I kept thinking there was something more I could do, some big life lesson I still needed to learn.  More patience, more kindness, more goodwill, more benefit of the doubt, more dispassion, more love. 

One day I read Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer, an excellent, thought-provoking book about Mormonism and the hazy boundary between genuine religious inspiration and psychopathy.   At the sentencing phase of the trial for a Mormon who claimed he’d killed his wife and daughter because God commanded him to, the guy’s lawyer made the case that he was mentally ill and shouldn’t be executed.  Krakauer quotes the defense attorney:

When narcissists are confronted by people who disparage their extravagant claims they tend to react badly.  They may plunge into depression or become infuriated.  When narcissists are belittled or denigrated they feel horrible.  They have this sense that they’re either grandiose, perfect and beautiful people, or absolutely worthless.  So, if you challenge their grandiosity “they respond with humiliation or rage” (DSM IV).

Fuck me, I thought.  That’s where the desperate fear of humiliation and ongoing, defensive displays of indignation and anger come from.  To your mother, who seemed freshly enraged that her humiliating apology was seemingly ignored when I got upset at the next hurtful thing she supposedly did, and your father, neither of whom I’d ever imagined might be narcissists, there is no middle ground.  They are either good, perfectly admirable people, or they feel utterly worthless and humiliated. 

No wonder they kept getting angry whenever I tried to talk painful things out with them.  In their zero-sum world our falling out HAD to be my fault, 100%. If I didn’t accept that, I was leaving the door open to a terrifying nightmare for them, that they had done something wrong that deeply hurt someone they thought they loved and that therefore they were unworthy of love themselves.  That was not going to happen, and they’d do everything necessary to make sure it didn’t, including assassinating my good name and killing our long, deep friendship.  Hell of a price to pay, no?

Conflict between people who love each other should not be hard to resolve, a little vulnerability on each side, a willingness to listen to the other person and do better handling their feelings in the future. Resolution only becomes impossible to resolve when the need to feel justified, perfect, beyond criticism comes into the picture, becomes the entire picture.  As you sagely said to me at the second seder “never disagree with M.”

Your mother, during her crabbed Woodstock apology that she did not behave better when I aggressively threatened her, by making her feel defied, noted that I’d made her feel the way she used to feel when she was fighting with you. And, BINGO! I realized I had to write this letter one day.

Like you, I was the “genius” of my tormented little family, and also, the eternal adversary of a prosecutorial parent who needed to “win” every conflict, in my case my father.   On the last night of his life my father was filled with regret and was finally vulnerable enough to recognize the many times I’d tried to make peace with him over the years.  He beat himself for being too fucked up to reciprocate.  I did my best to reassure him that he’d done the best he could, that if he could have done better he would have.  He was grateful for my merciful attitude, and I was grateful to hear him apologize for the first and only time in his life.  But what a tragic fucking “healing” it was, I closed his dead eyelids as the sun was setting the following day.

Maybe my estrangement from your folks, and the insight that finally made me stop flailing against it, adds a compelling dimension to this letter.  Something that should be fairly straightforward for people who claim to love you to fix “Eliot/T, we understand why you were upset, why you lost it for a second, why it was so hurtful to you when we wouldn’t accept your apology, why you needed to say what we would never let you say, it was wrong of us to angrily shout you down, not to mention not showing any appreciation for you reacting with love instead of anger each time one of us snarled at or threatened you…” proved impossible for them.  Now that I had that framework from Krakauer I had a way to understand the life or death stakes that made it impossible for either of them to make concessions that are unbearable to their self-image.

The really grievous injury, when people you love who hurt you don’t accept responsibility for causing you pain and insistently blame you for causing their anger, is the abandonment, and threat of making that abandonment permanent, afterwards. You can either accept all blame, take your beating, and move on like nothing happened to you, or it will get even worse for you. In the end, your only option (outside of truly realizing you are not to blame for your hurt feelings) is taking it out on yourself – or, as in the case of a broken friendship (much harder to do with a family member) getting out of the way of future blows.

Although my recent experience with your folks likely resonates with your own, I’m sorry if it intrudes on what I’m trying to tell you. Let me keep this letter directly about you and the challenges you face.  You recall that powerful moment from Goodwill Hunting when Robin Williams, as the psychiatrist, keeps repeating to Will “it’s not your fault.”?  It’s not your fault, Talia.  Sometimes we need to hear it from an objective observer, I was there very often and I watched everything with absolutely no ax to grind (to resort to cliché, just for the hell of it).

We are all sometimes, and in some ways, assholes.  The assholes who do their best to make amends and can truly forgive themselves, without conditions, love themselves (and others) the best.   I don’t mean forgive yourself no matter what, fuck trying to learn and do better and fuck everybody else. I mean forgive yourself, ultimately, when all the thinking and analyzing are done, and every demonstration of good will is exhausted, realizing you did the best you could, if you did, or, if not the best you could, maybe the best you could have done under those bad circumstances. 

Years ago my parents’ best friend, Arlene, took me for a walk at sunset, on a beautiful hill overlooking a verdant river valley soon to be “developed” by “developers”.  She lit up a tiny pipe, we each took a couple of hits, and she laid something heavy on me that turned on a light in the universe for me.   She told me to put what she was telling me in my pocket, think about it, that it might take a while to sink in.  

“You know your parents are my best friends,” she said.  I did, there was never more laughter in our house than when she and Russ visited.  The laughter would come up the stairs to our bedrooms, along with the smoke from Arlene’s chain smoking.

“I know you carry the burden of feeling like you are a disappointment to your parents, that you feel like you are the cause of their unhappiness and have to do something remarkable with your life to make them happy.  You need to know that your parents are very unhappy people, having nothing to do with you.  You don’t need to carry the heavy weight of their unhappiness.  You should put that burden down, it’s not your fault and it’s not yours to carry.”

No need to put that one in my pocket.   It was like she’d reached up and pulled a string to turn on the light.  We need to see what is our’s to own, and try to fix, and what is not.   The simple truth of it, obvious as it also was, once Arlene said it out loud, almost immediately illuminated the start of a long path out of a particular misery that had always been completely unnavigable.  

I have wanted to pay that blessing forward for forty years.  Whether I have done so now is up to you.  

If you get back to me, remind me that there is one more piece of this puzzling turn with your parents that I want to run by you and your brothers.  While it is almost certainly impossible to resume our friendship (the breezy social version I offered at D’s wedding apparently infuriated them), for the reasons I’ve set out above, I still care about them and have a specific concern about your father’s health, which doesn’t belong in this letter.   Not that there’s anything I can do about it, except bounce it off his kids.

My best to J.

Love,

Abe

MAGA intellectual firepower, batteries not included

Republicans, now MAGA (they virtually all vote with MAGA, every time, out of “fear of the base”) have been trying to cut back the hated government “entitlements” that protect many tens of millions of vulnerable Americans, at the expense of the corporate bottom line and vast, untouchable hereditary wealth. 

The entitlements of the superwealthy, of course, are never on the table, since the table is owned by the rich and powerful.  As God and Jesus both intended. The drive to limit, eliminate or “privatize” programs like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, The Affordable Care Act, public education, regulation of toxic pollution, has been a constant in conservative politics, and vocally, ever more loudly expressed, since at least 1980 (“The Reagan Revolution” — it’s cool to be greedy as sin, if you’re filthy rich).

The theory is that government spending is exactly like a family’s spending.  You have to prioritize and budget, to spend every one of your hard earned dollars wisely.  If you need, say, an extensive arsenal of deadly weapons to defend your home, you may have to cut back on things like medicine and a slightly more expensive healthy diet, even if the doctor has prescribed it.  If, the analogy goes, the country needs the largest military budget in human history every year, well, poor people and old people who can’t afford their own things have to suck it up and tighten their belts a bit more.

Also, key to this pisspoor analogy is the denial that raising income — for government spending tax revenue, something an elected majority could increase at any time by imposing a fair tax system — has anything to do with a family’s ability to buy things, (except, in the case of government spending) things that poor people or old folks might need. 

Because the US is the only civilized country that requires a 50+% majority to vote to fund allocations made the year before (the “Debt Ceiling”) a tiny majority of say five in the 435 seat House can hold the US credit rating, and the world’s economy, hostage by making big demands.   

What is the razor thin MAGA majority demanding, in return for this generally automatic bipartisan approval to increase the “debt ceiling” to cover current financial commitments?  At first it seemed to be cuts to the social safety net.  Biden called them out on it during his State of the Union, and they have squirmed away from that obvious plan of attack. Their latest “proposal” in the hostage standoff is reported by Heather Cox Richardson:

Now that Republicans have committed to taking cuts to Social Security and Medicare off the table, Vought has a plan to cut $9 trillion from domestic programs over the next ten years by cutting more than $400 billion from food stamps, cutting hundreds of billions from education, cutting in half the State Department and the Labor Department, and cutting $2 trillion from Medicaid and more than $600 billion from the Affordable Care Act.

“America cannot be saved unless the current grip of woke and weaponized government is broken,” Vought says in his proposal. “That is the central and immediate threat facing the country—the one that all our statesmen must rise tall to vanquish…. The battle cannot wait.”

source

Russell Vought, Heather informs us, was Trumpie’s former budget director.  Of course he was.  Heather continues:

But, as Jeff Stein, Josh Dawsey and Isaac Arnsdorf of the Washington Post point out, Vought’s stand is a little awkward, since he oversaw the explosion of the national debt as director of the Office of Management and Budget under Trump. In his first year as director, the debt grew by $1 trillion; in his second, by $4 trillion. Now he claims that the Biden administration is abusing its power by arresting people who participated in the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol and so must be reined in.

Vought’s proposal promises to balance the budget in ten years, but it also predicts the number of working people in the U.S. will increase by 14.5 million more people than the Congressional Budget Office says will enter the workforce. That surge—if it were to come—would push the economy to grow faster, thus reducing the deficit by an additional $3.8 trillion. But where the people will come from is a mystery.

Who says MAGA, who always unconditionally protects its own (until they need to be thrown under the bus to protect their loyal leader) is not led by the nation’s greatest intellectual giants?  You act like lying and magical thinking are bad things, you egghead, elitist prig!

In four years Trump and his appointees appear to have increased the national debt by 25% [1]. So?!

Yet Heather Cox Richardson continues to quote Biden, a president who 25% of Americans believe was illegitimately inserted into office by a powerful secret cabal of cannibalistic child abusers who hate our freedom and everything white Christians stand for:

Biden noted that Republicans have voted more than 50 times to change or repeal the Affordable Care Act since it passed 13 years ago. He also pointed to the fact that the chief budget consultant for the House Republicans is Trump’s former budget director Russell Vought.

Biden lies!!!

[1] Given the current debt is just over $31.4 trillion, Jolly’s self-described “rough” 25 percent figure claimed by Jolly is imprecise based on Treasury data; it is actually 22.3 percent of the current total. source

Impossible Letter #1 Big Surprise…

Impossible letter, indeed.

A few days ago (a mere 70 hours) I sent a short email to the daughter of longtime close friends, asking for her address so I can print out and mail a letter to her.  I told her I thought the letter might be useful to her. I wanted to mail it, rather than send it electronically, to give her a few moments of privacy with it before forwarding an electronic version of it to the family board of refutation.  (Here is a slightly redacted version of that letter.)

Crickets.

Her father had told me over and over, before withdrawing his friendship forever, that no matter what I said about our conflict, he wasn’t going to change his mind about anything.   He’d told me that he’s walked away from friendships for less than what I’d done to him (whatever that may have been — he never elaborated).  He told me I’d never seen him really angry, and that, trust him, I didn’t want to. As for anger, it was unfair, and totally wrong, to call his wife’s rage at me “rage”, it was just ordinary anger and she had apologized for allowing herself to be so provoked by my threatening aggressiveness.  He reserved the right to get indignant, over and over, as we ‘worked out’ our differences (I was hurt — no you weren’t!).   He spun every hurtful encounter, no matter how destructive to our friendship, into “progress”.  When I presented him with stark facts, he went silent, for a month, then called to see if I had learned my fucking lesson.  He concluded I hadn’t and that’s that.

I told my physical therapist that the adult daughter’s solution to having grown up in this kind of home was to openly declare her parents gods.  At every New York performance she would take a moment to salute her parents, her idols, and announce that her mother is a goddess.

“That’s creepy,” the therapist said, stretching my leg.  I nodded.

“Creepy, but smart,” she said, and I chuckled at how astute that was.

Big surprise that my final offer to tell the young woman what I thought would be helpful to her — not to blame herself because her parents had forced her into musical regimentation at a critical time in the young prodigy’s development out of ignorance, they didn’t know musical geniuses like Paul Simon couldn’t read music — fell again on deaf ears.  I thought I could help, relieve the kid of the burden of blaming herself for everything painful between her and her difficult parents, but apparently I can only hurt, now that I’ve brutally, gratuitously tortured and decapitated both of her godlike parents.

So the thing she learned from her upbringing in a house of absolute right and absolute wrong is the thing she does by reflex.  I get it.   As long as she remains sober, she’s ahead of the game, I suppose.  Like Eric Clapton.

Impossible Letter # 1

Dear T:

This note will have to stand in for the conversation I’d hoped to have with you for the last fifteen years or so.  Writing to an excellent writer makes me a little more hopeful that you will take in the message I am trying to convey.

The summary version: you need to let yourself completely off the hook for harmful childhood conflicts that were not mostly your fault.   Forgiveness is a great gift to give yourself, I can’t recommend it highly enough and I hope to convince you how indispensable it is.  It comes, in part, from looking clearly at the past and drawing honest, merciful conclusions about life.  It comes from an understanding that is often impossible to come to on our own.

My need to tell you this was kicked into high gear a few years back when a concerned C referred me to your final piece on that website you worked for.  In that emotional essay you painted the picture of yourself as a problem child who had inflicted great harm on your family by being an asshole. Why you felt that way is understandable.  For one thing, your parents, as I have now seen up close, are pros at presenting a united and unyielding front, no matter how strong the merits of the position they are opposing are.

Making this letter a bit more ticklish to write is the indigestibly tragic fact that your parents have judged me a person unworthy of their love (I know, in their version I did that to them).  A year or two ago this letter, making a simple point about self-mercy, would have come from a beloved family friend.  Not the case today. The short history (which omits occasional thoughtless treatment over the years that I never made an issue about) is that after a few days of an increasingly stressful Yom Kippur holiday in Woodstock, your mother lost her temper at me.   

In her mind she was being considerate to me and my arthritic knees by giving me the choice of two hikes that would begin at 10 a.m. the next morning.  To me, she was micromanaging the ‘vacation’ in a maddening way that was wearing me out.  In addition to the unacknowledged, escalating tension in that beautiful rented house, I’d been doing everything on short sleep as is my custom when hanging out with others, ignoring my circadian clock for a few days for the sake of spending more time with friends.  Feeling that I was resisting her at one point, she glared at me with a laser beam of hostility I have only seen on one other face: my abusive father’s.

Note how easily the entire “conflict” could have been avoided had I made it clear that everyone was free to do whatever they wanted in the morning, my feelings wouldn’t be hurt by not being there, I’d be glad to sleep until rested and see everyone when they got back.  Sadly, I hadn’t made this clear and, of course, that ship has now sailed forever.

A few hours after she stormed off to go to bed, insisting we had to leave at 10 a.m. and not 11 (your father had offered that compromise), I found myself retraumatized.  I was a 65 year-old adult, treated to a rage I saw frequently in my deeply damaged father, an unreasoning reflex to rage that he was bereft about as he was dying.  The sharp pain I felt in my lungs was identical to the familiar emotional punch in the chest from my childhood.  How was it possible to be treated this way, as an adult, by a dear friend I loved, who loved me, who I’d never had a cross word with in 50 years?  I’d been unable to close my eyes when I finally went to bed.  I didn’t want to wake Michele, I paced the house, unable to go outside because it was raining all night.  Of course it was.

In the morning, around dawn, your dad came into the living room to daven.  I was sitting in a chair, we nodded at each other and I turned aside to give him privacy to pray to HaShem.  He went back to his bedroom, came out shortly afterwards with your mom, who looked haggard and beaten.  I could hardly recognize her.  She told me she needed to talk. I told her I hadn’t slept, needed to sleep, was too upset to be sure I wouldn’t say something hurtful, something I wouldn’t be able to take back.  She insisted that she needed to talk right away.  I didn’t argue with her.

Her apology was painful to her, clearly, maybe even humiliating, but crabbed as it was, her desire to make peace felt sincere to me.  I told her I accepted her apology.  When she said at the end, uncharacteristically, “I need a hug” I hugged her and kissed her and went to get some sleep.

During her problematic apology (she made it clear she was apologizing not because she’d done anything wrong, but only because my aggressive, threatening manner had caused her to fear me, hence her bad reaction) she mentioned that I had made her feel the way you used to during your many fights.  And, BINGO.

Like you, I was the “genius” of my tormented little family, and also, the eternal adversary of a prosecutorial parent who needed to “win” every conflict, in my case my father.   On the last night of his life my father was filled with regret and was finally vulnerable enough to acknowledge that he’d been aware of the many times I’d tried to make peace with him over the years.  He beat himself for being too fucked up to reciprocate.  I did my best to reassure him that he’d done the best he could, that if he could have done better he would have. 

I think he was grateful for my merciful attitude, and I was grateful to hear him apologize for the first and only time in his life.  But what a tragic fucking “healing” it was, I closed his dead eyelids as the sun was setting the following day.

In the aftermath of our mutual trauma in Woodstock, two days later, your mother did something thoughtless, suddenly walking out while I was preparing the lunch she’d just brought me the ingredients for (she’d unilaterally decided she wanted something else, was taking Michele into town to go shopping).  After nervous peacemaker Michele kept anxiously asking me what was wrong with me, why I was so upset and so forth I finally exploded for a moment, uttered the dreaded fucking f-word, and the rest is history.   

Directing the word “fuck” to your loved one, in your parents’ eyes, I learned, is as unforgivable as beating her with a stick and repeatedly kicking her in the stomach.  My immediate apologies were weak tea coming from an abusive wife-beater, they weren’t sure they could ever really forgive me for that.  They remained upset for some time over my brutality, likely they still are today.

All of this should have been relatively easy to untangle.  Old loving friends, a couple of misunderstandings that could have been easily avoided (in hindsight), tensions nobody could talk about (I still don’t know what exactly is going on between your folks, they didn’t trust us enough to share anything specific) erupting into little outbursts of understandable frustration.  

It only becomes impossible to resolve when the need to feel justified, perfect, beyond criticism comes into the picture, becomes the entire picture.  As you sagely said at the second seder “never disagree with M.”

This letter has taken a slight detour from what I’d intended to convey to you, so let’s shift the focus back to your childhood and what I set out to tell you.  You were a musical prodigy.  Your parents didn’t want you to have the miserable, high-pressure life of a child star, they wanted to prevent you from becoming a monster and having an unhappy adulthood.  Their solution, classical piano lessons, was not a particularly good one, but it was done with good intentions.  

I’m sure your parents were unaware that Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney (and the other Beatles), Stevie Wonder, Paul Simon, Taylor Swift, Aretha Franklin, Django, Jimi and other musical giants (I suspect Joni, too, but couldn’t confirm it) can’t read music. Reading music, to your parents, was essential to being a competent, professional musician and songwriter.  Therefore, classical piano lessons and a succession of frustrating, frustrated, piano teachers.   Sadly, your parents didn’t understand that love of music, and playing and inventing it purely out of love, is the best way to develop a talent like yours.

I was at the dinner table at 181st Street when you sat on your dad’s lap.  V was there too, and recalls this also. You were a curly haired two or three year-old.  Your eyes twinkled as you got my attention across the table.  It was like you were saying “watch this, are you ready?” Then, a moment later, almost with a wink to me, you instantly sent your father into a spasm of anger.

Soon thereafter he went into therapy to learn how to avoid becoming the kind of angry, destructive parent his mother had been.  When he was satisfied he wouldn’t traumatize you the same way, he stopped therapy.

I’ll try to give you the schematic view now: whatever happened to H [T’s grandmother] to make her H (the dark side of her) led to her short temper with your father, her lack of control as she slapped him hard in the face whenever she got angry.   All very bad shit, no question, terrible and inexcusable.  

I’ve told your father the story of my eventual breakthrough in therapy (aided by my father’s first cousin who gave me the heartbreaking image of my father, as a toddler, whipped in the face repeatedly by his psycho mother) that allowed me to, not exactly forgive, but come to a useful understanding.  

I saw that my anger at my father was only hurting me (and certainly not helping him, though fuck him).  Bad as it was, he’d done the best he could.  I was still pissed, but, fortunately, I had enough emotional distance and understanding to be present and compassionate when my father was suddenly on his deathbed.  I was no longer going to reduce him to the sum of his inadequacies as a parent.  I had no axe to grind, only sorrow.  Luckily for both of us, we had one great, decades-overdue, honest conversation the last night of his life, and then he was gone. 

I kept urging your father to work toward this point in his feelings about his mother, while there is time.  It is a fucking tragedy to have this kind of deathbed reconciliation and to be left thinking of all the wasted years of senseless warfare that could have been avoided by mutual forgiveness, all the love foolishly lost.  

So much for a schematic view, here’s another shot: Your father can’t forgive his mother.  As a partial result, he can’t forgive himself.  Even as he understands it comes from his mother’s irrational demands, he feels he needs to be perfect, anything less is a torment to him.  None of us are perfect. 

When we hurt people all we can do is apologize and try to make amends.  It is the same with ourselves.  When you’ve done everything possible to fix a broken relationship, for example, and nothing is helping, in the end you have to let yourself off the hook or you go mad, turning the anger on yourself.  The only thing to do when someone you love is truly sorry about something they did to you is to accept their apology, forgive them, as you forgive yourself.  Can’t forgive yourself?  Can’t really forgive anyone else, or really love them. 

Would you have been a more prolific, protean composer if you hadn’t had those years in the straitjacket of involuntary classical piano?  Who knows.  We are all responsible for our own lives and our actions.  That’s not the same as taking the blame for things that are beyond our, or possibly anyone’s, responsibility and ability to fix or make right. 

I was tortured for more than a year trying to make peace with your parents.  The days before the following Yom Kippur, it turned out, were not right for the honest conversation we needed to have, your father got angry that I pressed for it, stormed out of the restaurant.   I kept thinking there was something more I could do, some big life lesson I still needed to learn.  More patience, more kindness, more goodwill, more benefit of the doubt, more dispassion, more love. 

One day I read Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer, an excellent, thought-provoking book about Mormonism and the hazy boundary between genuine religious inspiration and psychopathy.   At the sentencing phase of the trial for a Mormon who claimed he’d killed his wife and daughter because God commanded him to, the guy’s lawyer made the case that he was mentally ill and shouldn’t be executed.  Krakauer quotes the defense attorney:

When narcissists are confronted by people who disparage their extravagant claims they tend to react badly.  They may plunge into depression or become infuriated.  When narcissists are belittled or denigrated they feel horrible.  They have this sense that they’re either grandiose, perfect and beautiful people, or absolutely worthless.  So, if you challenge their grandiosity “they respond with humiliation or rage” (DSM IV).

Fuck me, I thought.  That’s where the ongoing, defensive displays of indignation and anger come from, a desperate fear of humiliation.  To your mother, who seemed freshly enraged that her humiliating apology was seemingly ignored when I got upset at the next thing she supposedly did, and your father, neither of whom I’d ever imagined might be narcissists, there is no middle ground.  They are either good, perfectly admirable people, or they seem to feel utterly worthless and humiliated.  No wonder they kept getting angry whenever I tried to talk painful things out with them.  In their zero-sum world our falling out HAD to be my fault, 100%. If I didn’t accept that, I was leaving the door open to a terrifying nightmare for them, that they had done something wrong that deeply hurt someone they loved and that therefore they were unworthy of love themselves.  That was not going to happen, and they’d do everything necessary to make sure it didn’t, including killing our long, deep friendship.  Hell of a price to pay, no?

Maybe my estrangement from them, and the insight that finally made me stop flailing against it, adds a compelling dimension to this letter.  Something that should be fairly straightforward for old best friends to fix “Eliot, we understand why you were upset, why you lost it for a second, why it was so hurtful to you when we couldn’t accept your apology, why you needed to say what we would never let you say, it was wrong of us to angrily shout you down, not to mention not showing any appreciation for you reacting in friendship instead of anger each time one of us snarled at or threatened you…” proved impossible for them.  Now that I had that framework from Krakauer I had a way to understand the life or death stakes that made it impossible for either of them to say anything like that.

Enough about me, (although my recent experience with your folks might resonate with your own) this letter is about you.  You recall that powerful moment from Goodwill Hunting when Robin Williams, as the psychiatrist, keeps repeating to Will “it’s not your fault.”?  It’s not your fault, T. 

We all sometimes, in some ways, act like assholes.  The assholes who can calm down, do their best to make amends and can truly forgive themselves, without conditions, love themselves (and others) the best.   I don’t mean forgive yourself no matter what and fuck trying to do better and everybody else. I mean, ultimately, when all the thinking and analyzing are done, and every demonstration of good will is exhausted, realizing you did the best you could, if you did, or, if not the best you could, maybe the best you could have done under those bad circumstances, is key. 

Years ago my parents’ best friend, Arlene, took me for a walk at sunset, on a beautiful hill overlooking a verdant river valley soon to be “developed” by “developers”.  She lit up a tiny pipe, we each took a couple of hits, and she laid something heavy on me that turned on a light in the universe for me. She told me to put what she was telling me in my pocket, think about it, that it might take a while to sink in.  

“You know your parents are my best friends,” she said.  I did, there was never more laughter in our house than when she and Russ visited.  The laughter would come up the stairs to our bedrooms when we were children, along with the smell of smoke from Arlene’s chain smoking.

“I know you carry the burden of feeling like you are a disappointment to your parents, that you feel like you‘re the cause of their unhappiness and have to do something remarkable with your life to make them happy.  You need to know that your parents are very unhappy people, having nothing to do with you.  You don’t need to carry the heavy weight of their unhappiness.  You should put that burden down, it’s not your fault and it’s not yours to carry.”

No need to put that one in my pocket.   It was like she’d reached up and pulled a string to turn on the light.  We need to see what is our’s to own, and try to fix, and what is not.  The simple truth of it, obvious as it also was, almost immediately illuminated the start of a long path out of a particular misery that had always been completely unnavigable.  

I have wanted to pay that blessing forward for forty years.  Whether I have done so now is up to you.  

If you get back to me, remind me that there is one more piece of this puzzling turn with your parents that I want to run by you and your brothers.  While it is almost certainly impossible to resume our friendship (the breezy social version I offered at D’s wedding apparently infuriated them), for the reasons I’ve set out above, I still care about them and have a specific concern about your father’s health, which doesn’t belong in this letter.   Not that there’s anything I can do about it, except bounce it off his kids.

My best to J.

Love,

Abe