Bad Blood

Memorial Day starts with cool air and gray skies. The sun is trying but not having much luck and there’s still a little leftover rain in the trees. It brings back a fuzzy memory of my grandmother and I driving to the cemetery to put flowers on my grandfather’s grave. All I really remember is that it was a long, quiet drive – he was buried in Northborough, a considerable distance from Boston but I never knew why. She is in Cambridge, at Mount Auburn Cemetery, my mother is buried in a small New Hampshire town and my daddy’s grave is in Nova Scotia, near where he was born and raised. It seems even in death, the family is fractured and disconnected.

All families, so it is said, are dysfunctional in their own way. In my house, we were, at best, five people who lived under one roof but had only the barest of interactions. We did not share our lives except in the most superficial and accidental manner. Except for anger, any display of emotion was non-existent. We didn’t touch, didn’t talk, didn’t meet except for meals which were far too often a painfully tense prelude to open warfare. Except for church on Christmas and Easter, we didn’t to anything as a family - no vacations, no picnics, no birthday parties, no weddings or funerals, no shopping excursions, no school projects or movies or family nights. My daddy worked, my mother drank, my brothers kept to themselves and I hid out at the library.

Temporary and always changing alliances formed and reformed but they had no depth and were invariably based on no more than self interest. When I discovered that not all families were like ours, that some genuinely seemed to love and enjoy each other and spend time together, it was a shock. Those families talked to each other, cared about each other, got mad at one another and worked it out. Those families knew each other. They could make one another cry with a particularly well considered Christmas gift. To my mind, it was dreadfully foreign behavior.

The other thing we did exceptionally well was keep up secrets and appearances. We didn’t talk about my ogre of a grandfather’s temper or my mother’s drinking or my daddy’s long term ladyfriend. We never mentioned my mother’s illegitimate half sister (I was in my 20’s before I even learned of her) or my grandfather’s alcoholism or my brother’s pathological side. It felt as if we didn’t care enough to even be dysfunctional. When I look back now, I think we were closer to being a boarding house than a family.

Adulthood and leaving home didn’t improve things. We carried the indifference with us and became acquaintances with nothing in common. Leading separate lives had become ingrained.

When the inevitable split happened and the estrangement became permanent, I had no sense of loss. I still don’t. You can’t grieve for something you never had.

Still, idle curiosity sometimes stirs inside me. I don’t know how, when or where my parents met. I don’t know if they courted, where they were married, who was there. I have no idea how he supported her or if she ever worked. I know they were both in the military because I’ve seen pictures of them in uniforms but I don’t know how they came to be in Springfield, where I was born, or later to Waltham and finally to Arlington. At some point, my daddy went to work for my grandfather and there he stayed but how that came to pass I don’t know either.

In the end, I don’t suppose it matters much. It all wound up in hurt feelings and bad blood and there it stays. All families – so it is said often and rightly, I think – are dysfunctional in their own way. We love our families or we survive them.