family relationships

April 9, 2023

To Love in Spite of Everything

Most of us have stories about our parents. When I get together with my brothers, we always call up funny incidents or their witty sayings.

The folks have been gone over 20 years, and I can assure you not all the events were rosy. These days, however, at a more than two-decade distance, we don’t care much about our old complaints.

Like water against the rock, they have been worn away.

Had you asked me about my early years a few decades back, I wouldn’t have spoken as often about the fun times as the dark ones.

They grew up in the Great Depression, and nothing about the economic survival of the Fabians (Jeanette Stein’s family) and Milton Stein’s home in the same period was easy. Nor did their parents win childrearing awards.

I was a therapist to people who still carried the psychological wounds of childhood. My understanding of their experiences sometimes grew out of my own youth. 

A number of my patients wished for different parents, a desire I never thought about but could grasp from the stories these women and men told me.

That raises questions.

Did you long for alternative guardians? Do you believe such a solution could have saved them from each other? Would it, at least, have prevented a portion of the emotional injury you incurred?

Of course, almost all of our caretakers did considerate things dumped in the same garbage can with the bad ones worth erasing.

What else would have lodged in the discard pile if the wish became real?

All your school friends, including a magnificent classmate met in fourth grade and held close to the present day. The games you enjoyed, especially those you won.

Remember too, the people who recognized the lovely voice you possessed, how fine your drawing was, and the teachers who displayed kindness or demanded more academic effort until finally, you gave it.

You’d never have encountered the next-door neighbor who played catch with you because he knew you missed your dad and the kindly owner of the corner candy store. He called you “son” and shared baseball stories. 

Don’t forget another adult who saw the goodness in you when the folks at home turned away in disgust.

In this imaginary vanishing of the elders, your first love departs, too, along with all the joyous, light, romantic dates with others.

These and 1000 other experiences — absent from your life.

Well, I hear you saying your life would have been even better with an alternative Mother and Father designed for each other and you.

Perhaps, but you’ve forgotten one missing ingredient to that superior life.

You.

I’m speaking of your life itself because if the same imperfect pair hadn’t made love when they did, you’d never have been born. Imagine a different growing sperm/egg couple taking your place on the bridge to the world.

Your parents gave you life, a chance, even if the winning ticket didn’t seem worth the paper it was printed on. Since you are reading this, it means you’ve found value in the time and the opportunity.

Much as we curse the darkness, the door exists to seek the light.

Do you doubt this? Read or listen to the thoughtful short poem by Sharon Olds, I Go Back to May 1937.

If the author’s apparent autobiographical details are her own, she describes how she invented a way to manage despite her parents.

There are many ways of overcoming.

Take one.

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The top image is Georges Braque’s Still Life with Ace of Hearts, 1914.

The first recitation of the poem includes the text as read by Guy Mulinder. His version allows you to read along with him or turn off the sound and read silently.

The second, by John Lithgow, is also very fine.

May 15, 2022

An Unwritten Diary

Its title is All His Life. The book’s cover illustrates a beautiful baby boy with garlands hung above the newborn’s crib, topped with a ribbon sewed into and above the fabric.

The 9″ x 12″ object has a satin-like covering, perhaps rayon. For the time, the volume probably wasn’t cheap. A gift, I suspect.

The first printed page offered the following:

All his life
is written here.
In pictured prose
And records clear —
From Infant small
To manly state,
Are told events
Both small and great.

The hardcover was published in 1944, but I came along later.

This particular copy of All His Life was about me.

The pages are yellow now, despite the old plastic bag in which the volume has been housed. I’m not pristine myself.

After naming the doctors who delivered me, the date, and the time, Jeanette Stein wrote her first question to my dad:

Is he cute??

Dad’s answer:

Don’t expect too much at first!!

I guess Milton Stein never got trained as a cheerleader!

The remainder of the 60-page volume is filled with more babies and boys, in colorfully lithographed paintings by Edna Mason Kaula, and space for answers to more printed questions. My mother’s elegant handwriting is featured in each response.

For example, the 11th page lists early visitors to the hospital or our apartment in the Logan Square neighborhood. Many spaces instruct the writer to “paste snapshot here.” Two blank spots are shaped like feet, two others like hands, all awaiting a bit of ink on those body parts for an imprint of my tiny appendages.

Gerald M. Stein’s weight at birth remains readable, written with a fountain pen in the same deep blue used for all the other entries. The mass-market ballpoint variety was new and uncommon.

Then?

Nothing? The last entry listed my height.

No first words, date of an initial carriage ride, or timing of the first smile. No record of when I discovered my hands. Nor can one find evidence of when Gerry began to walk or photos of anyone else, though I have an album including many early childhood pictures.

The publisher’s plan anticipated the growing young man would take over entering information after a while. I didn’t even know my parents received such a present until they died in their 80s, over 20 years ago.

Empty room for entries included friends’ names, hobbies, teachers, favorite subjects, ambitions, and space for “my philosophy,” which makes me laugh. Not the kind of thoughtfulness I possessed as an infant or a young man.

Funny about that in another way, as well. I only began dedicated reading of philosophy at age 65.

There is a blank spot for adult fingerprints. Perhaps someone imagined I’d take up a life of crime! Ah, but the times were more innocent, as evidenced by a place for my social security number, making identity theft easier. That common form of illegality took more years to emerge.

I’m sure my birth overjoyed my parents. Moreover, I quelled my mom’s fears by turning into a good-looking, curly-haired little boy. Well-behaved, too, by all reports.

Why then no additional attention to the book? I imagine my folks had plenty to do, buying the required necessities, doctor’s appointments, teaching me language, and learning how to handle a vulnerable creature. Everything was the first time for them and for me.

Mom told my wife she didn’t understand how to put me into the crib and just dropped me in at first. I hope she bent over a bit. Guidance from her mother couldn’t have been helpful, given grandma’s tendency to criticize.

Still, I would like to know more about my first few years. My children might, too. The time and its history fled like a sandcastle’s erasure by the incoming tide. So are the names of my parents’ youthful friends and distant relatives in the surviving photos stored in the bedroom closet.

Some people look familiar, but not even nicknames or occupations remain, except perhaps in the memory of a few of their descendants. As Goethe expected, names vanish “like sound and smoke.”

Most of us hope to make a mark on the world, something to outlast our lifetime. Children and grandchildren are the only posterity I care much about. That and the continuation of a habitable planet, a republican form of democracy (also called a democratic republic), along with the presence of enough enlightened and committed people to make it so.

As I got older, having achieved more in my life than I imagined (though nothing of grand, historical importance), my ambition slipped away. No major loss. I never persuaded myself of the meaningful value of what the Western World was selling. I didn’t even try.

Beyond what I’ve said, I will add a couple of things you’ll find contradictory and add one more thought as a bonus:

  • I don’t find most well-educated people as rational as they think. And, yes, I include Dr. Stein in this group on occasion.
  • Despite humanity’s irrational pursuits, life can be delightful. I find myself smiling and laughing more than ever.
  • I take myself less seriously, too,

No advice today, just the above observations. Make of these statements as much or as little as you wish. And I should add, try not to carry grudges, but give as much love as you can muster. You will never run out.

Any other way will reduce your well-being and the happiness of those you care about — and those you will care about if you know them.

I guess there was some advice after all.

April 3, 2022

How a Family Changes When a Parent Dies

About 20 years after our last meeting, I shared brunch with a girlfriend of my college years. We were then in our early 40s.

Her Chicago mom died a year before, and I offered some memories I had of her late parent. Janet’s eyes moistened, and she said, “No one knows mum anymore.“

She told me that after her move to the East Coast in her early 20s, she’d lost touch with the friends of her youth who were familiar with her family. Now, no one but Jan’s husband and her sister shared the recall of her folks, and the spouse was no fan.

As a result, something was missing beyond the woman’s presence. Once someone departs, they still occupy a living memory space that continues so long as any “rememberers” live. The unreality, loneliness, and despair attached to the misfortune are magnified when few witnesses remain.

That nonphysical library of recollection houses stories, funny and sad, and knowledge of the good and bad — a repository of the essential players and their experiences in the place and time they were all alive.

While sharing memory space with sisters and brothers may mitigate the hardship, it tends not to erase it. The demise causes an unpredictable number of potential changes. Few adult children see this coming.

They’ve known mortality was inevitable, but the suddenly silenced voice creates new realities unless a prolonged illness happens first.

Here are a few possible transformations involving relationships among the offspring.

1. We do not all respond identically to the death of a loved one. Some are stoic, some overwhelmed, others relieved. For example, adult children who did not resolve differences with the deceased may wish they had spoken earlier or made one last effort.

2. Differing reactions to the passing can cause siblings to think a brother or sister is making too much of the event. Or exposes less pain than is proper.

3. Sibs can also become closer in their mutual sadness and the process of offering and receiving comfort. In the most benign of circumstances, they show kindness and convey the sense that death demands the best of them because life and their loving attachments are all they have.

Recognition of the shortness of life and the significance of setting aside grudges can bond these witnesses to the life just gone by.


4. Some offspring recognize the importance of sustaining the memory of the departed one. Shared recollections and family jokes form a portion of their inheritance, an automatic bequest to survivors. Efforts to preserve that legacy might gain energy.

5. For those who share the extremity of the loss, reliance on the other for support presents a challenge. Imagine two swimmers beside each other, both sinking. Moreover, dealing with the details of funerals, memorials, unpaid bills, and managing the estate and the division of property tends to take precedence.

Attention to such practical and legalistic considerations holds the potential to disappoint those who interpret a sibling’s soldier-like necessity as a disrespectful lack of emotion. Alternatively, those who feel at sea can experience gratitude toward an individual who relieves them of a piece of the dark weight pulling them down.

Siblings process their internal complexities at different speeds. Anger and denial present themselves dramatically. Devastation creates slowed motion — the sense of walking as if in a fog, out of touch and forgotten by the rest of the world

All this carries surprise. Some who were weak might discover strength. Sibs who lived a life of authority may be bowled over by the tragedy.

6. There is still more to the family’s cleanup, reassembly, and repair than tasks uncompleted by a late parent. Caretaking if the senior was already in decline should be included in any accounting.

The challenge is more formidable if animosity between siblings exists concerning “who didn’t do his part” in taking on oversight of the failing sire.

No less is the resentment carried if they consider themselves a child disfavored by either a parent or a sib.

Feelings emerge about an unpaid indebtedness owed by those who did little or nothing for the folks, including phone calls or visits. Of course, whether and how much gratitude is due resides in “the eye of the beholder.“

The extent of those unfairnesses and the need for acknowledgment, thanks, and compensation depend on one’s perspective. If one of the folks survives, this further complicates what must be done to sustain the widow or widower.

7. Inequity of a different kind occurs if one of the parties removes heirlooms or other material things such as jewelry, paintings, and objects of unique meaning. Conflicts arise when verbal promises or understandings of “who gets what” haven’t been put in writing, were changed or ignored after wills were written.

8. A respected and respectful family head, often by his presence alone, enables civility in his children’s actions and reactions toward each other during his lifetime. Once departed, old differences between his offspring may erupt, and more recent ones emerge. In a sense, the authority figure kept everyone in line.

9. Multiple possibilities exist for the “afterlife” of the brood.

For example, if the parent set one child against another, his absence as an instigator of bitterness gives the siblings room to reduce or repair past difficulties.

Another possibility includes drifting apart from the family of origin. When the elder functioned like glue holding his descendants together, it is common for the sticky substance to disappear along with his life.

The physical distance between the adult children creates little chance for complete involvement of everyone in all the details of putting an earthly life to rest. Moreover, shared mourning must surmount one more hurdle when family members soon need to return to faraway locations and their lives and responsibilities elsewhere.

Similarly, focusing on the next generation and living in-laws can loosen the bonds between brother and sister. Sibs now have one less reason to get together on holidays.


10. Imagine a group with leaders and followers, funny and serious members, optimists and pessimists. Include whatever other characteristics you have noted within family groups. The removal of one such person might provide an open space, a type of vacuum in the form of an empty slot to be filled.

Think of what follows as an attempted corporate takeover, either a happy enhancement of the family’s togetherness or a ruthless change of ownership. Relationships and alliances shift and reshape themselves while adjusting to the recent vacancy.

If not well managed, a kind of game of musical chairs can make one or another feel left out or disadvantaged by the loss of status and influence.

11. Finally, the departure of a parent marks an end, not only of his literal availability but of a continued sense of him as a guiding, almost eternal protector and comforter.

When soldiers sustain severe wounds on the battlefield, it is common to hear them calling for “mother.” This unconscious notion of one’s progenitor as a stabilizing life force takes on godlike qualities beginning in childhood — the ability to assuage injuries and heal them with a kiss or a hug.

Obviously, if mom or dad died at a point after aging rendered them unable to occupy such a role, the disappearance of this security needn’t be so disturbing. Yet our perception of those we have depended on from the start doesn’t always agree with their aged capacities.

We carry the psychological desire for a devoted and unconditionally loving caretaker who supports us throughout our lives. Ideally, the parent figure has our back, cheers us on, and will “be there” when the chips are down.

Instead, the new reality tells us we must bolster our own confidence and take on the world with less help, a lonelier task now than before. It also informs us of our place next in line, moving toward the end of things.


If the upbringing we received is adequate and our will strong enough, we will grow into the job mom and dad held, providing reliance and a model for our own children.

Meanwhile, the connections among siblings can be thrown into the air like a deck of cards. The rearrangement can be painful, disorienting, or beneficial.

Much depends on what they do with it.

How do I know? Apart from my experience working with families, I also came from one that needed some work, as most do. I have two stalwart brothers, and we try hard to show respect and affection, sharing memories along the way. Our parents continue to “live” in the hearts they left behind.

I consider my fellowship and love for Ed and Jack a responsibility, a necessity, and one of the most important things I’ve ever participated in, not simply for them but for myself.

The Stein family of my generation is not finished yet.

Of that, I think Milton and Jeanette Stein would be pleased.

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The top photo is The Gribith Brothers and Sisters by Misterbowls. It is followed by Cold Sunset in Wyoming, 2022 by Laura Hedien. Next comes Brother and Sister, 1974, the work of Phongpaseuth.

The oldest photograph is a portrait by Berget of Andrew Winberg with Brothers and Sisters in Warren, Minnesota, around 1903, now housed at the University of Washington. Finally, a late 1959 picture of my family of origin. Jack, myself, and Eddie from left to right. Behind us, Dad and Mom — Milton and Jeanette Stein.

All of these were sourced from Wikimedia Commons with the exception of the Stein family and Laura Hedien’s wonderful shot: Laura Hedien Official Website.

Thank you, Laura, for your art and your permission to feature it here.