Category Archives: personal

The death of a 1000 cuts

The funny thing about the death of a thousand cuts is that sometimes you can be cut 980 times before you realize you’re being subjected to the death of a thousand cuts. In the end you’ll be cut to shreds, in fact, you already are, even as you’re deluded by protestations of love from the folks with the knives.

It’s like walking around with a wounded friendship, carrying it on your back with no idea that it’s already dead. And worse than dead, really, the corpse you’re hauling on your shoulders is actually a biting zombie intent on having a nice snack.

The uninterestings

The smartest woman in the room, a Harvard graduate with a successful literary agent practice who has read countless books, loved The Interestings, by Meg Wolitzer.   It is the epic fifty year story of friends from summer camp, who met the summer after my closest friends and I met at summer camp, and stayed close thereafter, their lives intertwining over the decades, as, amazingly, ours had.  My two closest friends were so excited by the book that they bought me a hardcover copy, in large print, no less, a kindness to my old eyes I always appreciate.  

I began reading the book, which starts from the point of view of an insecure, working class teenager Julie, a girl who is flattered to be taken in by a group of the coolest kids at camp, who rename her Jules.  This little group, The Interestings, forms the dramatis personae for the rest of the book.  I confess, I had a hard time making progress with the book, it struck me, from the start, as profoundly uninteresting, though context may have played a large role, as I will describe.  I got the audio version from the library and listened to it, determined to hear the whole thing.

Toward the end of the book the depressive husband of Jules tells his wife that her lifelong fixation with these Interestings has always been a mystery to him.  Aside from sharing an intense bond as teenagers, what was actually so interesting about any of these interestings?  He certainly spoke for me, and I suspect, many readers.

The pretty rich girl who was the queen of this little group wound up rich and successful, and married to a billionaire.  Her brother, a charming kid much loved by the females, wound up an expatriate in France, when it became clear he might be indicted for rape.  The eccentric, creative kid who couldn’t stop drawing and making little animations, became a billionaire, which is what happens to real geniuses, I suppose.  The musician became an engineer, I.  forget what became of the rape victim, though I think she remained friends with the others.  Jules became a social worker, I think. 

We didn’t wind up talking about the book my friends of fifty years had loved so much they bought me a copy of it.  Now that I think about it, we’d rarely discussed any books we’d read in common, beyond a thumbs up or a thumbs down.  It was not terribly long after I read The Interestings before a fifty year friendship with my two closest friends was over.  That’s fairly interesting, I think.

My friend flew into a rage at me over a conflict that, were she not so angry, could have been easily resolved.  Her righteous husband forced her to apologize to me the next morning, after I’d had a sleepless night, traumatized that my closest female friend had glared at me with a contempt I’ve only seen from my long dead father.  This famously willful woman’s loss of control, the show of rage, and the forced apology, I now understand, were mortifying to both of my old friends. 

Although I immediately accepted her crabbed apology, which, while blaming me for the entire incident seemed nonetheless sincere and the best she could do, they couldn’t accept my apology the following day for using the fucking “f-word” in a moment of anger.  Her husband rallied to his wife’s side, telling me I had no right to expect him to understand my feelings, because he was too upset by what I’d done (the f-word!) to hear about them.  In the space of two days, it was grimly clear these lifelong friends were no longer my friends.  It took me over a year to stop agonizing and see the obvious because it all made no sense to me.

My old friend called after the hellish five days in a beautiful rented house that ended our friendship and began “wasn’t that a great vacation?”  It went quickly downhill from there.  Next stop, a month or so of silent treatment from a friend I always communicated with a couple of times a week.  Then a demand to meet, and at that meeting, his wife beside him, he began “I’ve walked away from friendships for less than what you did to me.”  Instead of verbally punching him in the mouth, which, in hindsight would not have been unreasonable, I reassured him of my friendship and he accepted my assurance, handed me a great book they’d bought for me.

Reading this book, some part of me must have understood the superficial aspect of the whole thing, the intimate friendship beyond question, the need to tell the same cover story, stick to the dramatic script, swallow hurt because your hurt is humiliating to someone who claims they love you like family.  And, like family, you simply have to unconditionally accept the faults of your parents, your siblings, your flawed uncles and cousins. 

The rap goes like this: being family means that nobody ever has to hear or understand why what they’ve done hurt the other family member.  Family is a sacred bond that cannot be broken, except by vicious, unforgiving, treacherously angry people falsely claiming to be hurt and who can’t let go of their childish grievances.  You understand that if I hurt you, I love you more than you are hurt, so it’s a wash and stop trying to talk about whatever you claim I did to you.  It is your problem, not mine, not the family’s, dummy up, be quiet, swallow our version of what you think happened quiescently or you’re going to be fucking sorry.  You don’t threaten the family, you fucking filthy mouthed fuck!

Interesting, maybe.  On their influencer daughter’s Substack page recently there was a long post with advice about how to endure difficult people, presumably those who intrude with strong opinions and feel they can never be wrong.  These people, she suggests, must be placed on an UNSAFE list and only dealt with when you have all of your personal matters for the day taken care of.  Funny to find myself on that list, but, yo, that’s family for yuh!  You’d have to be a reckless idiot to risk a million dollar inheritance to indulge the need for someone your family deems unsafe to have a word in your ear.

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)

Image for a dead friendship

In hindsight, it’s often easy to see the moment when a friendship ends. The time of death can be placed pretty precisely in retrospect.

The image I had for the year I was hoping a cherished friendship was not dead was me carrying the corpse of a relationship I was desperately believing was not actually dead.

I realized just the other day that a more accurate image, in light of how relentlessly this heavy cadaver fought me to the death every time I tried to make peace, is that I was carrying a zombie who kept trying to bite me. Lovingly toting around a biting zombie. Try getting your brain around that.

Bad enough to be naive enough to carry the dead body of a beloved in hopes that maybe they’re not dead. But how much worse to carry a zombie that is actively trying to bite you the entire time?

I understand, but sorry

It’s sad, but also freeing, to understand that while somebody you care about can’t help their anger, feels they must behave as they do, their misery is also no excuse for things they do that become intolerable to you. What you can’t tolerate, you can’t tolerate.

“But if I can’t help it, it can’t be my fault!” the person might cry.

OK, but if you can’t help doing it over and over, and won’t talk about it, and I can’t stand it, I can’t help you either.

It’s as tragic as untimely death itself, but the math of it is pretty straightforward.

Isolation is bad for the health

Isolation, particularly if it also involves an inability to move around freely, is a form of torture.  Solitary confinement has finally been identified by the UN and various human rights organizations as torture.  Take away a person’s freedom, their ability to interact with other humans, and the outlet of vigorous exercise, and you’ve got yourself a nice, self-sustaining torture room.  Economical, too.

Humans, like many animals, are highly social creatures who take comfort in being together.   Being isolated with only your own thoughts, fears and moods as company will eventually drive a person mad.  The beauty of isolation as torture, from the sadist’s point of view, is that, as long as you are also immobilized, you cannot make it stop.  All isolation requires is silence from everybody else, which is easy enough to accomplish in our competitive, hectically busy world.  You just have to whisper a few specific, ugly things about the person you’ve isolated to anyone who might have been sympathetic, sit back, and watch your handiwork.   

People undergoing torture will do anything to make it stop.   To picture how destructive long term isolation is, think of its chilling political implications.  Here in the Home of the Brave (TM) we have tens of millions of isolated, grumpy old Americans riveted to on-line “communities” where their millions of new virtual friends all believe that adrenochrome, the mythical element in a terrified child’s blood that fuels the lust of “woke” cannibal pedophiles while infusing them with ungodly strength, is the demonic currency of the global plan, by you know who, to enslave all white nonpedophiles.   If they are that powerful, and capable of that kind of satanic atrocity against innocent children, what do they have in store for the rest of us?

On a personal level, I woke up with a slightly larger sense of isolation today.  The scared feral cat I had patiently gained the trust of, and who I fed every day as he rubbed his head against me to be petted, is lying dead outside the window, apparently clipped by a speeding car the other night as he waited to cross the street he’d crossed countless times.  

I had been giving two more old friends of fifty plus years the benefit of the doubt for the last few months.  Even as I suspected, during their long silence, that a good outcome from this benefit of the doubt was doubtful.   Today I woke up to more silence, a goodbye kiss from Sekhnet (off to the city for a couple of days) and then, ruminations.  I thought of another unanswered WhatsApp I finally sent out yesterday, after no comment on my upcoming knee replacement surgery text,  “understood, you believe I am unforgiving and dishonest” sent to a close friend I’ve known since we were fourteen.

Do the math, a fifty year friendship with friends since we were teenagers, and you will see another example of the obvious:  childishness is not limited to young kids.  We are sociable, we are also clannish and our choices are subject to whim, peer pressure and narrow self-interest.  Some are immature from cradle to grave.

I had two unsettling conversations with my lifelong friend, months back.  In the first, she lambasted me for being unforgiving, unloving, and torturing two dear old mutual friends who loved me dearly.  When I protested that she’d been told an unfair, untrue story, gave my account of the senseless conflict that was being pinned entirely on me, my “defensiveness” proved my guilt to my old friend.   I had the creepy feeling I was the defendant in a witch trial.

“You’ve worn me out,” she said as she got off the phone to have dinner.  

A few weeks later the theme was my dishonesty.  She told me that if I really can’t forgive these cherished lifelong friends, who clearly love me, I have to be honest enough to tell them.  Neatly, the entire mountain of bat shit had been piled on me.  Not only an unforgiving, loveless, torturing prick, but a lying one too.    My character had been assassinated, this old friend was talking to a despised, stinking corpse.  I seemed to be the only one who didn’t realize I was already dead.

I understand now that what sent the old friend who set this all afoot into a rage was that I was probably the only person in her life who, in fifty years, had never contradicted her about anything.  I was always easy to get along with, even when she was being mercurial, controlling, judgmental, I always understood and never took anybody’s side against her.  Suddenly, during a tense “vacation” with her and her husband, worn out by days of mounting stress, I seemed to be defying her — for the first time ever!  This “et tu, Brute” moment made her fly into a rage and have a full blown shit fit.  And thinking about it, what safer target for her rage, that had been building for a long time, amid the endless Covid crisis at work and awful, mounting tension with her husband, than the one person in her life who had never made her feel bad about herself?

From her point of view, as she angrily explained whenever I brutally tried to resolve the conflict, she never got angry, never did anything wrong, she only apologized to me the morning after I claimed she was mad because I was clearly so weak that I’d been hurt by nothing after I’d been so threatening and aggressive and completely to blame for any “tension” I perceived.  I was also stubbornly unwilling to take responsibility for causing all the bad feelings between everyone there.  From her husband’s point of view, whatever she said, that was his position.  If she said something different, that was his new position.  

While I spent a year of torment trying to fix a broken friendship, and preserving their privacy (since I truly didn’t understand how things had come to this ugly pass), these determined winners were working overtime to control the news cycle and destroy my good name among everyone we knew in common.  Of the two stories about our falling out, their ever-evolving one and the one we’d all lived, one makes much more sense than the other.  This could be a big problem to these two respectable, sociable people, make them look shamefully imperfect and less than 100% admirable.  Intolerable!  They went to work, passionately confiding in everyone we knew in common the story that left them the complete victims of me, an unaccountably vicious asshole. 

From their friends’ point of view, if they were both that hurt, and told the identical story, and Eliot wasn’t talking about it, then Eliot must be a sadistic, diabolical, lying, unloving fuck, no matter how he might use his silver plated lawyer’s logic to try to twist the facts, and love itself, to obscure that ugly truth.  No matter how well he’d hid this from us during those decades of carefree, seemingly loving friendship.

Most people, you may have noticed, prefer simplicity to complication.  It is a worldwide disease at the moment — there are only two choices in any situation.  It is either Red or Blue, Unregulated Capitalism or Totalitarian Communism, Systemic Racism or Senseless Rage, absolute forgiveness no matter what or an inability to love.  This is by design.  It is much easier for tyrants to rule unopposed if everything is phrased as a war — black vs. white, good vs. evil, God vs. Satan, love vs. hate and everyone is constantly provoked to fight to prove they are on the right side of these ephemeral absolutes.  The irresistible power of this divisive strategy is that a statement like “good people on both sides” when one side are Nazis and Klansmen and the other side is their intended victims, cannot be seen as a statement of moral neutrality.   Claiming there are good violent racists means that you agree with their plan.

Political tyranny is a vast human nightmare, and a necessary part of its hellscape is the terrifying personal isolation of all citizens, particularly if they don’t take part in the lynchings and pogroms.  Everyone is vulnerable, at any time, to being denounced to the authorities and subjected to the harshest punishment.  The same goes for the reign of personal tyranny, maintained by what is often called Narcissistic Abuse.  The person who can never be wrong has the same bag of tricks as any despot and the same reflex to deploy them to deadly effect if unquestioning loyalty to them is ever violated.  If you live within the social circle of someone who can never be wrong, who must always be seen as perfect, and obeyed, know that they have always practiced bringing others to their side against all enemies and get used to the taste of being vilified and cast out if you ever make them feel bad about anything.

Doesn’t make the bitterness of it that much easier to get used to, mind you, but it’s a good reminder that the world is simply the world, homo sapiens are not necessarily “wise apes” and that the only things we can really influence, on a good day, are our reactions to the ongoing shit show.  Cold comfort on a cold day, I know, but better than resorting to desperate acts, no?

Then, silence.

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