Endings

If you read this blog at all, you already understand that I put a lot of faith in Dr. Phil, and that is mostly because much of what he says agrees with things I believe or have already done.  It affirms my confidence in my ability to call a spade a spade, to understand a given situation for what it really is. Rarely do I disagree.  But today, I did.

I was watching a re-run Dr. Phil show on the OWN Network today, on which he was dealing with feuding sisters--sisters whose animosity toward each other was tearing the whole family apart.  This show featured two sets of sisters, but his treatment of them was the same.

Normally, Dr. Phil will say, "This family needs a hero--someone to step up and say they are bigger than the argument and will no longer engage in animosity."  He did that today, too, but he was also talking about the finality of the end of families.  "Your cancer-victim father is going to die--maybe not now, but some day.  And your mother will go...and your sister.  Eventually, one or more of you will leave the others in this life, and whoever is left is all you will have.  You need to figure out how to fix things so that you aren't left all alone in regret of what might have been."

He was right, of course, but I disagreed that life would necessarily be full of regret if the fences weren't mended.  My brother died without ever reconciling with my sister and I, but it wasn't our fault.

I've written about this before.  My brother had a romantic view of our family farm.  He was not a farmer, nor had he been down to visit the place in the years after our father died, but he wanted to keep it in the family because it had been so for generations--well over 100 years.  And I understood that.  But after our father died, there were problems with maintaining the property.  None of us were farmers and none of us had any experience with managing farm property.  My sister worked her butt off to keep things going, from having the well repaired to having the roof replaced...to finding renters to keep the place from being declared "abandoned" by insurance.  We never really saw any profit from the place. What profit there was went right back into maintaining the place.  And so it went.  I was campaigning to sell the farm to our tenant farmer who was willing to buy.  In time, our sister began to agree with me, and our two cousins (who were also partners in the farm) who were also desiring to sell.    Doug (my brother) felt secure because he had, he said, our sister Shari's word, as the executor of the property, that she would never sell.

When the sale papers were mailed out, Doug refused to sign, which threw everything into a whirlwind.  The attorney was appalled and encouraged us to influence him.  Our buyer-farmer only had so much time to seal the deal before everything would fall apart and have to start all over again.  Doug, considering himself cornered by the 4-to-1 vote, signed the second round of papers in protest.  He told my sister and I that, once the transaction was completed and he had his due, we would be "dead" to him and should not bother to even try to contact him.

I knew our brother very well.  I understood that he meant what he said and that anything we did to try to contact him would just give him fodder to tighten the screws on our relationship.  My sister, his "other mother" throughout our growing up years, still tried to let him know how much she loved him.  She sent him a birthday card which he sent back to her as "refused".  It hurt her, big time.  I took the approach to respect his "no contact" wishes, thinking that he would, some day, come to his senses...and when he did, we would be there with open arms to gather him back into the family.

I didn't happen.  Doug dropped dead in a store in River Forest, IL, on New Year's Eve Day of 2005.  Somehow (and to this day, I don't understand how) a police officer sent me an email to ask me to call because "Mr. Covill is sick and cannot speak for himself."  Mr. Covill was dead, and the rest is history. The sisters that he cut out of his life became the ones responsible for his final services.  We did the best we could.  Actually, I'm proud of how well we did, considering that we had not had any information about him in maybe five years.

Do you know what didn't happen?  I never felt a moment of regret that I should have done more.  I felt bad that Doug didn't live long enough to forgive his sisters for the "betrayal" that he felt, but my life didn't change one iota by his eternal absence.  He was already gone, by his own choice.  Anything I coulda/woulda/shoulda done would just have given him ammunition to rattle his swords more. Stubbornness is its own reward, I guess.  I didn't buy into the madness, and I'm not ashamed of that.

Doug never hurt me again, as he did our sister.  But I would have loved to welcome him back to the fold, had he decided we could be part of his life again.

Through all the years of my life, I've had a lot of "endings".  As a Navy kid, leaving one place and a set of friends largely meant never seeing them again.  I've learned not to count on things.  Nothing stays the same, no matter how much we want it to.  I don't think that makes me a pessimist--maybe a realist?  If you want to see me fall apart into a heap of emotion, take away my daughter or my grandchildren.  I would simply die with no desire to live any more.

Long story short, endings are part of life, no matter how much we would like to change that.  My sister and I--the only remaining members of our immediate family--have buried all childhood hatchets and hold each other up in our old age, as best we can.  If either of us "ended" today, there would be no regrets.  Thank God for that!