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Just helped my mother draft a letter to the brother she's not seen in a quarter of a century. I suppose it is somewhat normal when someone dies for the survivors' lives to turn into a goddamn soap opera, but I could live without a lot of it, I must say.
Granny wrote him a "YOU ARE NO LONGER MY SON" letter twenty-five years ago...
DOOF!
No one has ( Read more... )
Granny wrote him a "YOU ARE NO LONGER MY SON" letter twenty-five years ago...
DOOF!
No one has ( Read more... )
The incredible muliplicity of ways WWII continues to fuck things up, even as the people who remember it die. My grandmother was a very young nurse in the Blitz; she saw some horrific things and, with that and the constant proximity to death I think she may have had a lifelong case of PTSD. She had this complete inability to express emotion directly or healthily and her compulsion to push people away, for example. On the other hand, during the war, she had excitement and purpose. Well, you know I'm not a fan of Sherlock, but that quote -- "You're not traumatised by the war. You miss it." I think she was both. Because after the war, she married, and now she was supposed to adjust to being a housewife. She never had a job, let alone such an important job, again. Her husband was against married women working, but so was she. She didn't even think there should be female bank tellers let alone female politicians. And yet she was clever and insanely bored. And all this manifested itself in various emotionally abusive ways towards her children. And my aunt is a lot like her, (Mum said "you're just like Mummy" to her once. There followed wailing and weeping and lying down in a darkened room).
I've just had an invitation to a little New Year's celebration with some friends, and to be honest I'm probably going to grab it with both hands. Mum has been nothing but incredibly stoical but I feel I have to get out of here or lose my mind entirely.
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Having read your reply to schemingreader, about all I can think of to say is that dear Mr. Larkin missed out a few relatives when he wrote "They fuck you up." And how these family narratives are so often a weird and unpleasant variety of kaleidoscope: the particles are all neatly arranged so, and how easy it is to forget how provisional that arrangement is, how it's not even, really, an arrangement.
Apropos of this and from a somewhat different angle, I'm reading Daniel Kahnemann's "Thinking Fast and Slow" -- with Amos Tversky, Kahnemann was an early developer of ideas and research into cognitive errors. (Tversky is dead and one rather lovely thing about this book is that it's a memorial to their friendship and intimate collaboration.) Kahnemann gives one common error the acronym WYSIATI, for "what you see is all there is" -- aka, how we instantly frame apparently coherent narratives around a few bits of information, and then that narrative becomes unshakable & all new evidence is turned to its service. And there you have the makings of many family dramas (as well as conspiracy theories), no?
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