With family, it can be a long journey to finding understanding

MELONE E-mail: Click here Archive

By MARY JO MELONE

© St. Petersburg Times, published June 25, 2000

Last spring, when I went back to that place I still call home, I visited my brother. He is buried atop a short hill beneath a tree in the Pennsylvania countryside.

I knelt and touched the bronze marker in the ground that bears his name. I said I was sorry. I thought if I waited around long enough, I'd hear his voice again, rough and exasperated, as it usually was when he spoke to me.

Monday is the third anniversary of his death. Carl was killed by a trucker who smashed into him as he changed a tire on a Maryland interstate. The trucker never so much as slowed down. I've told you about this before -- this time last year -- because I thought it might lead to tips to track down the driver.

It did not. My disappointment was harsh as horseradish at first but has passed, somehow. I have moved on to a harder problem.

My brother was not easy. He was not open. I did not understand him. Now I am trying to forgive him, for how he was, and myself, for the way I was. I was his younger sister and expected more than he could give.

This sounds like just my story, a dip in the pen of self-indulgence. It is not. Last week, I had a long talk with a woman who was generous enough to speak openly of her grandparents, parents, aunts and uncles, siblings and cousins, all of them living in little houses on one block for years and years.

Her family's story was dotted with the usual petty resentments and stabs to the heart. But she still lives near most of her relatives and talked of them with obvious love.

She is part of her family, not trapped in it. When I asked how she had managed to strike this balance she uttered the unforgettable: "You have to forgive them. Otherwise, you'll become just like them."

I must have been in another room when that lesson was taught, growing up.

Even now, when I hear some clergyman go on about forgiveness, I roll my eyes. His anecdotes are pat. He misses the complications that make the words, "I forgive you," snag and stick in the craw. Other words instead want to fly out. "But wait till I tell you what else he did to me . . ."

Suddenly I see my brother. I see myself. We are adults, at some family get-together, each with our scotches and our cigarettes, and glaring at each other. We are somebodies with credit cards and business cards. We move easily in our separate worlds but can't step into each other's, even though we have so much in common.

Our hearts are equally closed. Our minds are equally certain. We each have an unwritten record of what one got, the other didn't, what one got away with, the other didn't. We're still fighting as we did when I was 6 and he was 10, over toys and our parents' favor. We just use different words, covet different things.

In fiction, the movies, understanding of this kind comes suddenly, and the person who reaches it is struck swiftly by his insight like St. Paul on his horse. Fiction and the movies have to move this fast. The story would otherwise drag on and bore the audience. My life, like yours, has nothing to do with the made-up. My vision has cleared only slowly. It's taken these three years to lower my guard and look.

Until now what I felt about Carl was only a noise, the cry of a person who had lost the power of articulate speech. All I thought was that the world could hear my heart break when my brother died, that the world could see my shame at failing him. The world went on without commenting, and I had to work this out at my own pitiful pace.

Some readers complain my topics are too dark, my way of seeing too critical or gloomy. This will be one of those times for those readers. Try as I might, I can't relate to them. I always thought there were only two things worth talking about, love and loss. Now I'd add a third: forgiveness, this thing so necessary, but so hard, to put your arms around.

© St. Petersburg Times. All rights reserved.