This year while watching TV news I found I simply couldn’t anymore.
Watching newscasters on TV brings back a memory from when I was in the midst of my first semester finals in the Graduate School of Economics at the University of Wisconsin after I received an “I’ve got bad news,” telephone call from my father.
My two oldest nephews, Willy, aged 12 and Tom aged 10, had vanished after taking a rowboat out on Puget Sound. The family, broken by this time by years of dysfunctional fighting between my parents, was going West in two shifts: my mother and I first; my father and his new wife second.
As soon as I entered his house my oldest brother. Will, took my arm and walked me over to a Coast Guard map, telling me the story as we went. A storm had come up, he said pointing to the map, “this is where a woman on the shore saw them struggling in the boat”.
He traced the trajectory of the two boys’ trip from the beach in front of his house to that point. “She called the Coast Guard, but their ship was out on the water, and it had no ship-to-shore radio.”
As I studied for exams that week, and went for walks on the cold, lonely January beach alone and with my mother, visitors came flocking in each day with more food than any of us felt like eating. I watched as Will took each one in to the map telling the same story as he told me. Over and over again.
I recognized what Will was doing. My second oldest brother Les had once sent me a list of “psychological defense mechanisms” while I was in high school. Les and I were both trying to understand what was going on in our family.
Will was clearly in shock, and he was also in denial. So was I. Seeing two boys of about the right age playing on the beach one morning as I came down the wooden stairs to the beach, I felt a leap of hope in my heart that they were my nephews, even though I knew they weren’t.
I’d grown up with those boys and lived with them when Will was more like a father to me than my own father.
It took me nine more years to lose that hope during a dream when I saw my nephews playing on the other side of a river and called across to ask if they were dead. They nodded “yes”.
Most of you probably know about the list of defense mechanisms Les gave me, but what I want to talk about now is what the frequent use of them in my family did to me as a young girl and is doing to all of us right now. Continue reading →