A Decade Examined - Part 9 & 10

Photo by Johannes Plenio on Unsplash

March 21, 2025

I started this series with the intention of looking closely at each of my past ten years as I approach my 70th birthday. Why? Well, to be honest, I had challenged myself to publish a post every week, and a series like this would give me ready-made topics for many weeks.

Also, I really wanted to revisit the events of those years and what I brought to them and what I took away. So, I came up with four guiding questions:

1. What happened? Was there a significant experience or milestone for me? For my family? How did this affect us?

2. What was the impact of world events on me, my family, and my community?

3. What did I gain? … lose? … learn?

4. Did I come upon any place where “two roads diverged” (with a bow to Robert Frost) and what do I think about the one I didn’t take?

However, I haven’t referenced those questions much, if at all. Instead, they’ve been the backdrop for my musings. So It seems appropriate, for the final post of this series, to answer some of the questions directly, as I look at the two years from March 2022 to March 2024. The standout event in both of those years were about family. To begin this story, I need to back up a month, to February 2022.

What happened? Was there a significant experience or milestone for me? For my family? How did this affect us?

What did I gain? … lose? … learn?

Siblings: David, Linda, and me, 1955

Cast of Characters

I’m using initials, in case any of these folks would prefer not to be named in a public post. The exception is my sister, Linda.

Linda — my sister, born in 1941, 14 years ahead of me
C -- Linda's elder daughter, the youngest of her first three children, who were born in the late 1950s and early 60s
SJ -- Linda's younger daughter, born in 1980
SM -- daughter of C, born in 1985
R -- my daughter, born in 1992
M -- my son, born in 1994
K -- husband of SM 

Background: My family of origin has never been close in the typical ways. Those of my parents’ generation spread out all over the country, so the whole family never met up for vacations or holidays. Also, there were the rifts and fallings-out that happen in every family. And there were reconciliations, sometimes years later.

2022 - 2023

Due partly to a falling-out many years past, and partly just to busy lives in the present, my kids and their cousin SM didn’t see or know each other much as children, though they all are millennials. Then, in February 2022, SM reached out to M and R, who lived respectively in Flagstaff and Los Angeles. SM was planning a trip out west and wanted to visit each of them—and she did. She then returned a couple of months later to spend a weekend hiking with M in the Grand Canyon.

By the way, SM was living in Washington, D.C., at the time, but I hadn’t met up with her. As I said, my family lacked a tradition of closeness. And, as M said to me, “Mom, you could ride your bike to her house.”

My brother David in Linda’s and SJ’s garden, 2019

SM’s reaching out to her cousins laid a groundwork of relationship building that led to my having lunch with SM, K, and C (SM’s mother) when C came from New Jersey to visit in August. That lunch led to an invitation to me from C to stay with her when I visited Linda in September. And that visit led to an amazing peach pie, which you can read about here.

I spent most of a day with Linda. She was living with SJ in the house she had lived in since moving from Arizona to New Jersey in 1967, with her second husband and her three young children. Many years later, having divorced the husband, Linda gave birth to her youngest child, SJ.

The house, which now is more than 100 years old, stands in the midst of an inner city that has grown up around it. Every spring and summer, the tiny backyard has filled with hundreds of flowering bulbs and bushes, vegetables and herbs growing up from the ground and down from hanging baskets. The garden, cultivated by Linda and later by SJ, was like a colorful, living postage stamp from our mother’s home in rural Arkansas.

The day that I would spent with Linda was important. She was 81 and her health had been declining for some time. Now she was suffering the aftereffects of a fall and major surgery. I knew this would probably be my last time seeing her.

I’ve mentioned the lack of any norm of closeness in my family. Though we were cordial and even friendly (when we weren’t fighting), we kept our emotional distance from one another. Conflicts were not discussed or worked through—none of us knew how to do that. We had our share of behaviors that fell outside the rules of social acceptability, including mental illness, addiction, pregnancy without marriage, and divorce, all of which were kept secret and referenced in euphemism, if at all.

I wanted to make amends to Linda, not for anything I did wrong, but for the circumstances of our two lives, which had heavily favored me. Our parents grew up in farm families and married young, just as the Great Depression began. They were resource-poor and each brought generational trauma into their marriage. When Linda was born two years later, they were about as ready to be parents as any 20- and 22-year-olds.

By the time I came along, our parents had fourteen more years of maturity and experience. They also had more money. Dad’s career was upwardly mobile, and Mother went to work full time as an elementary school teacher as soon as I started school. Linda was probably a rebel by nature; I decided pre-consciously, as young children do, to take the role of the “good” child. For all these reasons and probably more, I was a lot more privileged than my sister, and this bothered me.

I needed emotional courage to talk to Linda. (Remember, our family never discussed emotionally hard things.) In the afternoon while she napped, I took a 15-minute prayer walk around the neighborhood. When I returned I told her, as simply and transparently as I could, how I believed she had been wronged and what my role was in that. I said I was sorry.

Linda didn’t respond directly, and I hadn’t expected that of her. But I noticed the relaxing of an invisible tension, and a new ease in our conversation. I felt grateful.

Soon after that visit, Linda began receiving hospice care at home, and she died at the end of January 2023. This is from a tribute her daughter SJ posted:

She loved camping and Bluegrass, owls and birds, being odd and unconventional, chocolate and being served. She was a woman whose water broke with me while she was gardening. As I've been told, she continued to garden since it was such a beautiful day, tending to her pregnancy once she was done. The kind of woman who was a career social worker and literally took in the homeless and would (against all rules I'm sure) have clients visit our home when they needed to talk.

There were other important family events that year, and I’ve already told those stories because in early 2023 I started blogging regularly at my website, then switched to Substack the following November.

2023 - 2024

The standout event of the next year took place in July 2023, when I learned about my younger brother, Steve. I’ve written about my older brother, David, in several posts, beginning with this one, and in Part 2 of this series.

Most of what I’ve written about Steve is in this post. The part of the story I’ve haven’t yet told is the beginning.

Steve is my half brother; we have the same biological father. I first learned about him from my mother, back in 1998 when I took R and M, then young children, to visit my parents in Phoenix for my father’s 80th birthday. As we were getting ready to fly back home, my mother took advantage of a chance moment alone with me to tell me about Steve, who was born when I was 7 1/2 years old. It was quite a surprise.

I could have followed up and maybe learned more; she told me where I could find a public record of his birth. But I had little kids and a busy life, and I didn’t get around to it. Over the years I occasionally wondered about my brother, and thought sadly that there was no way I could ever find him.

Then in the 1980s came advances in the science of DNA testing, and in the 1990s a new test that required only a small amount of DNA, which could be collected with a cheek swab—and relationship testing became commonplace.

Our father

It happened that SJ, Linda’s younger daughter, is a certified genealogist, and Steve’s daughter, let’s call her H, also is an enthusiastic family researcher. The two learned from an ancestry site that they were genetically first cousins. They had no idea how this could be, so they both went to work on it. Finally H, using both the genetics and clues from her family’s history, followed the trail that led to my father. When SJ sent her photographs of him in middle age, H was certain. There was no doubt that he was her father’s father.

To me the resemblance wasn’t so clear from just photographs, but as soon as I met Steve in person it was obvious. And the connection runs much deeper than appearance. During my first visit with Steve, I saw in him many of our father’s personality traits. And when a question from SJ prompted me to pay attention to his mannerisms, I saw that his gestures in conversation were exactly like our father’s.

The relationship Steve and I have forged is a source of endless amazement and gratitude for me. Although we are very different—in upbringing, life circumstances, and temperament—there is a mysterious connection that runs far under the surface. While Steve and I were getting to know each other through email and phone calls, my sister-in-law, Chris, commented on the uncanny similarity in our personalities.

I’ve described some significant experiences and milestones from the two years leading up to my birthday last year. I can’t say how they affected anyone else, but they’ve given me a sense of the value of my relationships and moved me to prioritize the people close to me—family members and friends—and put aside my own stuff in favor of the people. This might sound obvious to you (duh!) but, having grown up in an atmosphere where relationships weren’t much nurtured, I appreciate these lessons I’ve lately received.

The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.

— William Butler Yeats