He’s got custody of his newborn daughter which he’s ill-equipped to handle. His son wants nothing to do with him. Emmaline’s sister shows up at his door and blames him for her death. The daughter Doug never knew about because Emmaline gave her up for adoption without telling him arrives, bringing her own anger and abandonment issues.
She had been in a nursing home for several years, deteriorating at a snail’s pace. On my annual visits, my brother and I would question the wisdom of stockpiling old people in places like this.
“We did the best we could.”
At the time I thought, yeah right. That was your best? Well, it wasn’t nearly good enough. Parents of their generation didn’t compliment their children because they didn’t want them to get a big head.
Maybe we were finally over losing Pepper. If only we could find another dog like her. But that is impossible. How do you replace the perfect dog?
“We never agreed. You dictated and eventually I swallowed my own objections. I’ve been choking on them ever since. Joy is here now and she stays.” Marcy tugged Joy’s hand and Joy followed her to the kitchen feeling her father’s stare of disapproval like bullet holes in her back.
We sit with her and we become zombies too. Not the flesh-eating kind. Just the vacant non-thinking kind because all we think about is how sad our mother’s life has become. How powerless we are to do anything about it. How much we want to get out of this place. We leave and never want to come back.
will they do what I’ve done with so many of those photos? Say to themselves, “I don’t know who this is.” And toss it in the trash.
I will always believe Maxine had it right. This, it seems to me, is the key to contentment: Living the life God intended for you.
for my brothers and me, Maxine was always our favorite aunt. Hers was the house you could go to where you’d never be judged, criticized or disciplined.
We were discussing his relationships with women. I told him he didn’t have any respect for women in general. He said he thinks his problem is something deep inside and he probably needs therapy to get at the root of it.
