Dear Sister:

What can I say? It’s been too hard, these past nine months. Far harder than necessary or reasonable. We are both burned out and now find we don’t fit into one box where we must operate.

We each have dreams, responsibilities and duties. I’m leaving too much to you right now. I don’t feel good about it, but now the busy month has come and I must march through the processes which lie there. I promise, at the other end of the month, to find my way back to the responsibilities I share with you.

There has always been something fundamentally askew, akimbo, out-of-kilter in our family. Some cruel streak that makes us fight hard and not find our way back to each other. This has caused us all trouble in the world: Mom, in her disastrous relations with everyone; you, in your serial dysfunctional work situations; me, in my mixing it up with some I should be natural allies with. A family curse handed down generationally.

What I don’t share is the cognitive disorder piece. I do share the emotional fragility piece, and the skill and willingness to fight for a little while when I find myself in dicey situations. But I no longer have the stomach for it. The first whiff of conflict and I want to flee. No winners and losers, just flight. I make the decision again and again to take flight; to lick my wounds; to try to find my way back to strength and clarity. To avoid opportunities for fresh hurt.

I think it’s the 20 years of RC I churned through. I think it’s two decades of discharge on all the pain. I no longer participate in the practice of RC, but I love that it’s stamped me, changed me, permanently. I don’t quite go back to the time before.

The time before... where I see my family members... When I was on the RC journey, I tried so hard to share the good I was getting from it. It was seen as more of my flakery. In truth, I see the connections between things others try not to see and call flakey. But RC and other practices were wise stuff. I never wanted the religiosity, the ceremony... but I wanted to change. And so my perspective is no longer what my family wanted it to be. I escaped.

I walk through a war-torn territory that is my family’s history. They are rooted to it and function out of it. They so carefully set up their controlled territories. Some want deathly quiet and mucho television to numb on. Some want to be entertained. Some want to feign independence while forcing others to do their bidding.

Yi yi yi... and I am nowhere near perfection, myself. But I am a little happier and a little closer to living my dreams. And, coming from where I come from, that’s something.

Supernova

The last years before my father's stroke, he burned so brightly we could hardly look at him. He expanded, increased velocity, heated up, inflamed the landscape. He lost his radar for how he affected others, in his zeal to share all the things that were churning through him.

He was always a spiritual being and he read deeply on Christianity and spirit. Never a fundamentalist, nor a biblical literalist, he was nevertheless full of love and energy for the message of Christ. Eager to see God when this life was over.

His invisible stroke a year ago, disappeared the man we knew. He morphed into a new form, one absent of spiritual questing and intellectual curiosity. A man who always had at least five books going at once now does not read. He read his last book, a Christmas present from my sister, Treasure Island, in January. Then he watched the movie. And he was done.

I try to offer him his beloved poetry and opera, offer to acquire any artistic/cultural thing he might enjoy. He tells me he's 'content.' I ask him what that means and he says, 'a simple existence.' And when I ask him what that means, he says, 'I cannot express it.'

I pray this means he's reached nirvana, a state of zen. The state of grace the religions promise, but which we never really see on earth. He's been stripped of most of the human things: the trouble-making, the provocative. Sometimes he has a day when he's playful. My mother insists he's improving.

But sometimes to me he is the living dead, so far from the man I've been close to my whole life that I don't know him. Just a nursing home patient I help to take care of. I cart him to doctors. Sometimes out to dinner. I wonder when to start pushing for a wheelchair, as I pushed for the walker. He quit falling when he got that.

Every day I have to remember to say goodbye. In my memories, there's a huge population of those I've said goodbye to. All my childhood homes have been torn down. My grandparents gone. Uncles gone. What I have is today. Just today.