Hard Lessons In Death And Unforgiveness

by Kevin Burton

    This bit of Burton family lore started small, sprung up unexpected.

   We had a maid named Mrs. Long. This was before the basement at my father’s house in Yellow Springs, Ohio  was finished, when you could still practice hockey on roller skates and shoot a plastic puck into a 4-by-6 cheese box.

   My sister Pat addressed Mrs. Long, let’s say, less than cordially.

   “You make me sick,” Pat said.

   She snapped off the sick part and said it so dramatically that I knew she heard that on some TV show. I never asked Pat about that part, so strong was my assumption.  Mrs. Long was good to us. None of us had any real reason to dislike her.

   “Don’t you Eh-vuh tell me I make you sick,” was Mrs. Long’s outraged crescendo reply. “I’ll paddle your fanny good!”

   Her “good” came out “goo-ud,” pretty much rhyming with “fluid.”

   Somebody offstage, or in what would later become the next room, fell off his skates, cracking up. That was me.

   “Oh, you think that’s funny?”

   I didn’t say yes, but I didn’t stop laughing, so Mrs. Long had her answer.

   After a little more back-and-forth between Pat and Mrs. Long (which come to think of it wasn’t so much back-and-forth, Pat having been shushed), Mrs. Long said, “You a NAS-ty lil girl!”

   Sorry if that story didn’t leave you doubled over, didn’t resonate. I’m sure I didn’t tell it well enough. It’s almost certainly the last time I will tell it.  

   You really had to be there.

   I was there, Pat was there. Mrs. Long sought different employment eventually, leaving our household. She was long, long gone, pardon the pun.

    For Pat and me, the story was side-splittingly funny, well past the hundredth telling, with me doing the voices and both of us close to breathless.

  Pat never once said, “yeah, yeah, I’ve heard that one.”

   It’s still a story, a good story, but it’s no longer a shared story. That’s because Pat died last year, two days ago today, just two days shy of her 58^th birthday.

   Today would have been her 59th birthday.

    So today, instead of telling her to hold on to your 50s and enjoy them as much as you can, I’m telling myself, and you, to hold onto life itself and enjoy that as long as you can.

   I love those stories about siblings who beat up on each other, but then if anyone from outside the family threatens one of them, that outsider will have hell to pay from the whole group.

   But there are also stories of family bonds coming unraveled. Hard feelings calcified into stone silence.

   Blood is thicker than water. It’s also a lot messier when things go bad.

    If you walk down to the nearest pharmacy to get a bottle of sarsaparilla and a bag of chips, you maybe pass a dozen houses. Inquire at those dozen houses and I dare say at most of them, maybe even at all of them, you will hear a story or two of family discord, a somebody-done-somebody-wrong song, family ties edition.

   Just last week my wife Jeannette’s Uncle Dick recounted some unresolved family quarrels in his family.  You probably have stories like that.

   Pat and I had many more good times than bad times together. But in the time just before her death, it was mostly bad times, silent times. This will forever be a complicating factor in my grieving her loss.

   When Pat died, my mind went back to giggling together through Sesame Street and The Electric Company. Not so much giggling toward the end.

   Mrs. Long was wrong. Pat was not a “nasty lil girl,” nor was she a nasty grown-up woman exactly. But she had her moments of being “less than cordial.”  There were reasons why we didn’t talk much toward the end.

   Last year, to explain my periods of silence, I told Pat, “When people don’t treat you right, you avoid them.” That’s an easy truth.

   But forgiveness is at the heart of Christianity.  I am a Christian but I didn’t forgive. That’s a greater truth. This is on my record. I failed my sister, I failed myself. I failed my God. I failed.

   Now I’m stewing in that failure, hoping time and memory will mix in the sweeter times to go along with the bitter.

 “Catsongs” is an alleged “series” on Page 7, of which in seven months I have managed just an introductory piece Jan. 28 and the one about Harry Chapin’s “Cat’s In The Cradle” that ran yesterday. Pat and I had two major shared interests, cats and rock music.  So I’ll be poking around popular songs with cat in the title, poking around my own love, grief and regret.