........The marriage of her parents
Frank and Anna had been marred by the sense of mission that her father felt in
regard to keeping his siblings close and in frequent communication. Her
father’s siblings had also grown apart like in Rob’s family, but theirs was a
bitter and endless drama that eventually became a cold war. It had become his
life’s purpose to reunite them, but he never really understood or accepted that
he could not achieve this on his own. It would have required enormous good will
from the six of them--three brothers: Frank, Eugene, and John, and three
sisters: Colette, Maria, and Loretta--to accomplish that. They argued with
each other from the early days in her parents’ marriage and prior to their
marriage. The pattern was always the same-- argue over trivial things (to
others but not to them), then slam the doors shut and close their hearts indefinitely
to the very people with whom they had grown up, open up a bit again, perhaps on
a whim, and then slam doors shut again for even longer. Eventually the doors
slammed shut for good.......
........Perhaps they had
cared about each other when they were children, or when they were adults and she
wasn’t looking or paying so close attention. She remembered them as the
creators of so much drama and sorrow in her youth. It colored her memories of growing
up, the domestic family dramas, the melodramas, her aunt Colette and her
husband Tom arguing at family get-togethers and her aunt locking herself in the
bathroom and crying hysterically, or her other uncle, John, who was an alcoholic,
who came home from his drinking bouts to his sister Helen, with whom he lived,
and immediately started an argument with her to alleviate his fury over the
misery that had become his life. He had been jilted at the altar, and Helen always
offered up that little tidbit as the explanation for his behavior each time he
went on the attack, but in truth, even when Lara was a teenager, she knew that
he was sick and that he had trapped himself in alcohol and doomed his life to
his dependency. She did not feel sorry for him, although his behavior never
really stopped her from wanting to visit her uncle and his sister, until the
end, when he lay in bed dying of his disease. She saw him as a person who
ruined the few happy times when family had gathered together, and as a person
who ruined lives. But hearts are large when you are young, she thought, and you
think they will stay large and expand forever, and that they will continue to
love and to forgive and to feel and to want, and then one day they don’t do any
of those things anymore.........
