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.

Tuck you, Carlson

The families of every one of the 140 Capitol and DC police officers injured by the violent mob on January 6th 2021 should sue deliberately lying, entitled patrician Tucker Carlson. Let their lawyers come up with the theory of the case.

Tucker’s got the money to pay them. He was born with a shitload of it, and is paid millions more by ancient Australian salt water crocodile Rupert Murdoch to keep the credulous watching as he simply asks provocative questions and fans their fear and hatred.

In Carlson’s telling, none of these injured officers were hurt by any member of the throng of meek and respectful tourists who peacefully entered the Capitol, legally, to express their legitimate hurt that the 2020 election had been stolen from their preferred candidate. Carlson’s recent Josef Goebbels impression is below.

According to him it’s a fact that everyone who said there was violence on January 6 is a liar who deserves no credibility.

Carlson tells his viewers that lying Democrats, and Kinziger and Cheney, would have you believe that the real crime was not the stolen November 2020 election but a peaceful assembly of concerned citizens engaging in what the RNC called legitimate political discourse (disrupting a joint session of Congress). Tucker says they were justified, and peaceful. He describes the lying Commies’ “grave betrayal of American democracy” so simply, so clearly.

They were “meek” “respectful” “sightseers” who, although rightfully angry, revered the Capitol building and law enforcement. They legitimately believed lies repeated by people like Carlson himself, who knew he was lying, while insisting on the truth of his lies in spite of all the evidence. The angry, peaceful crowd of Trump supporters knew for a fact, in spite of a vast bipartisan conspiracy against him, that Trump had indisputably won by over a billion votes.

The 30 million dollar cleanup cost to repair the Capitol building, cleaning up defecation left by some of the meek, respectful tourists who were there legitimately after presumed FBI provocateurs, heavily disguised Black Lives Matter and antifa terrorists presumably smashed the windows and overran the police who they greatly outnumbered… fake news spread by lying woke sickos. Like the 140 law enforcement officers taken to the hospital with various injuries, a bunch of America-hating liars.

If you have the stomach for it, here’s five minutes of this brazen piece of shit, doubling, tripling and quadrupling down on his version of the truth, to the sound of a cah-chinging cash register.

Both sides

Another very short reminder, if one was needed, that there are at least two sides to every story.

This doesn’t mean that both sides of a given conflict are equally true, equally based on what actually happened, equally easy to defend.  It just means that for every truthful statement of fact there are a thousand less truthful ones that can be made.  Among these less truthful versions are outright lies, motivated by malice and designed to convince people of “alternative facts” which, they argue, are just as good as those old fashioned verifiable ones captured in actual recordings, especially when deployed in an existential war between good and evil.   

Here is today’s 15 second example, from people who try their best not to lie to their viewers.   Your opinion on which people I mean will vary according to the devoutness of your faith in your deepest beliefs about reality.

“I am your retribution”

As Lyin’ Ted Cruz angrily argued the day before the January 6th MAGA riot that disrupted the certification of Biden’s electoral victory, if 25% of the population believes something, even if it’s a demonstrable lie, that’s grounds for a pause on all constitutional activity.   Common Sense, snarled Lyin’ Ted, as he announced that he would contest certification of Biden’s “victory” the next day and demand the formation of a special commission to investigate whether the soundly debunked, evidence-free lie of a stolen election was actually a lie or not.

A couple of years ago, at CPAC, the faithful wheeled out this cartoonish idol, a plastic looking golden calf, an item of worship for those who believe Christ himself anointed the cracked vessel Trump to save the unborn and fight the undead.

At a smaller than usual CPAC convention the other day Trumpie took the stage for an ominous one hundred minute speech.  He told his faithful:

“In 2016, I declared: I am your voice. Today, I add: I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed: I am your retribution [1].”

Heather Cox Richardson adds:

He claimed that he and his followers are “engaged in an epic struggle to rescue our country from the people who hate it and want to absolutely destroy it…. We are going to finish what we started. We started something that was a miracle. We’re going to complete the mission, we’re going to see this battle through to ultimate victory. We’re going to make America great again.” After listing all the “villains and scoundrels” he and his followers would “demolish,” “drive out,” “cast out,” “throw off,” “beat,” “rout,” and “evict,” he continued: “We have no choice. This is the final battle.”

Two sides to every story, First Amendment, blah blah blah.  Let’s hope this is the final battle.

[1]

Santos/Devolder/da Vinci’s office in Eastern Queens

Former Douglaston office of NY Congressman Thomas Suozzi, who retired rather than run in 2022, and whose name was still on the office, on a large sign, just a couple of weeks back. It is now the office of hard-working Congress distraction George Whatever his name is, working tirelessly for his constituency, even as they call on him to resign, while keeping the lowest of low profiles in Douglaston.

To his credit, he’s trying his best to make the AR-15 the official gun of the USA! USA!!

Anger, anyone?

Anger is a common, dangerous emotion, a momentary draining of all goodwill and the ability to think.  It’s at the root of all violence, and it always makes the violent person feel completely justified while they are raging. 

At the same time anger is an important warning system that can tell us when to get out of a combustible situation. 

Complicating this complex emotion even more:  show anger and you are instantly seen as the aggressor, no matter how relentless the provocation may have been, no matter how reasonable and patient you may have been before getting angry. 

The most pernicious anger, in a certain way, is the anger that is always repressed, denied, justified as not being anger at all.

There are people, my mother was one, who fly into a rage if you mention their anger.  It’s not, in their mind, that they get mad, they are just outraged that you would unfairly accuse them of something that couldn’t be further from the truth.   My friend Mark Friedman was a great example of this angry denial of anger.  He would fold his arms across his chest and glare churlishly at any suggestion that his anger may have played any part in his most recent conflict.  In my experience, anger deniers often seethe quietly at the suggestion that they are experiencing anger and may not be seeing things clearly because they’re angry. They tend not to scream or punch you.

Hey, we call it getting mad.  “Don’t get mad, get even”.  Anger is, actually, an evolutionarily important form of temporary madness. It plays an important survival role, but it can also disable certain functions. There is the famous experiment where researchers wired the insula, the part of the brain that lights up when you fall in love, have a creative idea, are in a flow state, and when you get angry.  They have you answer some moderately nuanced questions and tally a baseline score.  Then they make you angry and watch your insula light up.  They ask similar questions and find that you are basically unable to answer or answering them “fuck you!”

This is the engine fueling the vast profitability of social media — keep the person angry, they keep clicking and the ad revenues keep cah-chinging. 

It is the mechanism at work in MAGA-world, in someone like Marjorie Taylor Greene’s brain.  She shows up at a meeting the other day, sits next to a Republican election expert who confirms that there was no widespread fraud in the 2020 election.  She immediately, very pleasantly and confidently, tells him that thousands of dead people voted in Georgia in 2020, that there was widespread Democrat [sic] fraud, that Trump won Georgia by a huge margin, that this guy is no expert at all, basically that he can kiss her privileged white ass.  The clip of her owning this RINO probably goes viral (Marjorie leaves the meeting immediately after creating this contrarian content, according to the election expert) and Marjorie is back in the gym, having herself filmed heroically doing pullups and pushups, for another social media/fundraising post.

If you are mad as hell, and believe Biden is a commie puppet on the payroll of his son’s laptop, you’ll receive a jolt of energy watching Marjorie angrily tell this RINO cuck so-called expert to suck it and then watching her powerfully work out in her crossfit outfit.  That’s how anger fuels anger and keeps the loop of denial of anything but your anger going.

Anger removes cause and effect thinking, you simply can’t track back to follow an argument that does not conform to what your anger is telling you is right.  Anger is an insistent bastard, if it is fed, and one of its main tricks is making all nuance disappear.

Here’s an aggravating example I‘ll try to describe dispassionately.  There has long been a hellish standoff between the Israeli government and the Palestinians.  You can call it many things, but none describe a good situation.  The far-right government in charge of Israel now, like the far right everywhere, is fueled by anger and fear.  The Israeli right is angry that the anti-semitic world is unfairly villainizing Israel for protecting herself and they fear that the countless enemies of Israel will destroy her if she is not strong, vigilant and aggressive in fighting all enemies. 

Anti-semitism is on the rise worldwide and there are millions who hate both Jews and Zionists, so they are not crazy to feature these things.  It is only their “solution” that is… well, that fuels the very things they fear and hate.

Many supporters of Israel, even ones who dislike this far-right cabal that has been in charge for a while, chafe at the word apartheid being used to describe things like the series of security checkpoints Palestinians must spend hours a day lining up at to enter and leave Israel, the two sets of roads, the inequitable distribution of water in the occupied territories and so on.

Without taking sides or a position, and refraining from calling the unholy Israeli coalition of ordinary authoritarians and religious extremists a bunch of fucking Nazis, I will describe a tactic used by supporters of Palestinian rights (and it is beyond denying that millions of otherwise innocent human beings live in atrocious poverty in crowded camps and cities).  It is the same tactic that brought down the apartheid government of South Africa:  Boycott, Divest, Sanction.  Many liberals call for this pressure to be placed on Israel and there is heated debate about this tactic. 

On the plus side it is nonviolent and it already worked to end brutal segregation in South Africa.  On the minus side, it stigmatizes a fellow democracy and doesn’t guarantee a just resolution of an intractable crisis.  Bernie Sanders, for example, has repeatedly stated that he does not support BDS against Israel.

Lobbyists for Israel have called for a law here in the US making it a felony for any company to support BDS.  Under this proposed law, if you are a corporation, business or wealthy individual and you endorse BDS — even if not practicing it yourself —  you are guilty of a felony punishable by a large fine and in some situations prison time.  Bernie Sanders, for one, is against this law and has stated his opposition publicly.  One obvious problem with the proposed anti-BDS law is that it criminalizes otherwise protected First Amendment expression.

But, Bernie Sanders, in the minds of many, because he opposes this extreme law, is an antisemite and self-hating Jew who supports BDS.

This math is so easy to do if you are angry.  Nuance is impossible to see when you’re mad.  There is no difference, when your insula is glowing from anger, between someone opposing a law that does violence to the First Amendment and someone who supports the worldwide strangulation of a great democracy and the end of protection of all Jews everywhere from annihilation.

Never Again.

Anger is a motherfucker and the most destructive emotional force we are up against.  It can be fanned into flames that will burn everything you love.  Any lie is good enough to support indignation and one lie builds on another.  The angry mind can’t make distinctions, which is why a constant “FUCK YOU!” is a perfectly valid response to anything you don’t want to hear.

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