Legacy in The Stuff That's Not Interesting But Is The Most Interesting Stuff I'll Write

I suppose I didn’t explain myself very well in my last entry. I was overcome by my rant on privacy that I never actually got to balance out exactly what I was trying to say had happened. But I have a perfect example that occurred yesterday.

I have two grandfathers (well, I have significantly more than that, but these are the two with whom I have spent the bulk of my lifetime). One of them is one of the greatest men I’ve ever known. Despite the somewhat hurtful things he says to me, I know that he doesn’t say them to be hurtful, he says them because he doesn’t understand exactly how those things make me feel. He’s one of the few members of my family whose age and birthday I remember, mainly because he is exactly 50 years older than I am. Even when he told me gays are going to Hell on his eightieth birthday, I somehow knew that he wasn’t exactly talking about me specifically. He raised me for 15 years and yet events conspired in my teen years to create this barrier between us that will probably last until he dies. Even then, who knows.

My other grandfather could not be more different. In fact, he’s evil. I know that doesn’t sound realistic, but it’s true. He’s alone, joyless and has tons of money which he holds over the rest of the family. He makes my mother absolutely miserable and demands her time while also degrading her. He is ground zero for all of the abuse that happens in my family. The way my mother verbally and emotionally abuses me is just a repetition of the behaviors she sees from her father. He did drugs for so many years that his health is declining, unfortunately, not fast enough for anyone feeling his wrath.

Earlier this week, my cherubic grandfather, whom we shall call Papa C, had a bit of a health scare. Aside from a heart attack at the beginning of the 2000s, he’s had nearly excellent health. He was that man who was in his sixties and seventies whom people believed was actually in his forties or fifties. He has remained vitally active, it’s only since his suddenly acute hearing loss that he’s actually started resembling anything of an old man. Well, earlier this week, he found blood in his urine.

Being that he is the centerpiece of the family, everyone was completely turned over to hear about this. The reason is frightening is because his wife, my grandmother and the person whom I care about the most, is currently facing rapidly declining health with congestive heart failure. Her sister and brother-in-law are currently both facing stroke/multiple heart attack and cancer diagnoses in San Francisco. The idea of everybody dying, suddenly, at once has frightened my entire family is really difficult ways. We made it clear, we wanted to be there for them.

My other grandfather, whom we shall call Papa B, has been the opposite. He’s had declining health since the early 2000s. We are all shocked that he is still alive and a little disappointed at that fact, too. Since he entered his fifties, he has looked like he’s in his seventies, and now that he’s nearly eighty, he looks like a reanimated corpse from one of those zombie television shows.

Yesterday, when Papa C was heading to the hospital for a dye test and CAT scan, we all decided we would go with him, at the very least so Grandma doesn’t have to sit alone. I was going specifically to provide a translator because she cannot speak, and having been raised by here, I’m the only one who can interpret for her with any kind of accuracy.

As we were on our way, Papa B calls my mother, wheezing and crying, saying that he needs her to come over and help him because he can’t breathe and he wants to go to the ER. He needs her to help him put on his pants and prepare for the ambulance to come. When she told him where we were going, he said, “Oh that’s fine, you help him, he’s more important than I am. I’ll just die.” He spent twenty minutes on the phone going on-and-on about how poor his health is.

Finally, we had to go over there. I had to go because he abuses my mother to such a level that she refuses to go over there alone. Plus, I tend to mitigate the abuse simply by the virtue that he and I are, unfortunately, very much alike and he sees me as a kind of legacy.

There was nothing wrong with him, he was just upset that Papa C was getting more attention than he was so he faked a health problem to make us choose him over Papa C. It’s this evil mental manipulation, and this is where the source of many of my problems come from.

Problem number 1 is that I genuinely dislike my mother. I feel bad, but I have run out of remorse for her. He has no power but she capitulates to him every time out of some kind of fear. She lets him do all of this to her and it really bothers me. On one level, and I do feel bad phrasing it like this, she kind of disgusts me. She becomes so weak and frail while also equally enraged, but her rage doesn’t do anything but create more frustration with which he uses to make her feel weak.

When I am with him, I don’t give him one inch. He told me yesterday, after he found about my phobia of driving, that I should see a psychiatrist. I told him I already had, and then he said that that’s something that I need to get fixed while I’m young because I’d never find a “real” job without the ability to drive and I’d never be able to survive. I snapped at him that I’m now in my thirties, I’ve lived in several different cities and managed to get around find without a car, and that his advice was neither solicited nor welcomed. My mother was instantly worried that I’d upset him.

So-the-fuck-what? He’s not a raja!

Problem number 2 is that I have overeducated myself past the point of acting on feeling. This is why my mother gets so frustrated with me, because she doesn’t see me get enraged or miserable. I have been told before, by people other than my relatives, that I am cold or distant, even unemotional. That is not true. I have feelings but they do not control me. It is very rare for me to make a grand emotional gesture or decide something because of some feeling that has overcome me. I have spent so much time studying and learning about human behavior that I am not immediately enraged or saddened when people do these things.

I honestly believe it was because I was so emotionally blindsided by 9/11. Now, when there’s some school shooting, of which happens constantly here in the States, I am not overcome with grief, although I grieve, I am not enraged because we need to take their guns away, although I feel we need some kind of safety guards put into place. I feel like this needs to be investigated thoroughly and dispassionately so that we can find some kind of common thread that can stop these incidents.

Apparently, that’s cold and unfeeling. Maybe it is, but it is the way I am.

I understand Papa B all too well. I know exactly why he does the things he does, and my mother gets enraged, starts simultaneously crying and pounding the steering wheel while becoming even more enraged that I don’t seem to have the reaction she wants. In fact, she said, “I know you don’t care, you’re above it all.” The reality is, I do care. I am not above it.

But what help is repeatedly saying “I fucking hate him, I wish he would die” or “Maybe it would be better if I just died first”? That’s not helpful, in fact, it’s doing to me exactly what he does to you. Suddenly, you’re a victim that I need to start worrying about. I need to suspend my worry for Papa C to comfort you over the abusive relationship you have with your father because you participate in it. I will NOT be absorbed into that cycle.

Problem 3 is that I am nearly an identical version of Papa B. You would think having been raised by Papa C that I would have absorbed some of his attributes. But no, that’s not true. Genetics connect me to Papa B not Papa C and because of that, when he hears me, he hears echoes of himself. While my mother was gone on an errand, he went off on some tangent about “the blacks”, in which I joined him. I believe that these topics can be discussed without me having had the necessary authority of having lived as a Black American in order to discuss it.

In fact, I related to him the controversy that erupted when someone corrected me for saying “Black American” instead of “African-American”. There is no way for me to discuss racism without sounding racist, because I’m white. Just as there is no way for men to discuss feminism without sounding misogynist or heterosexuals to discuss sexual orientation without sounding homophobic. You have to get over your fear of sounding wrong and bigoted if you want to get to a greater truth.

I actually halted him, stopped him in his tracks, and made him think about his position. He didn’t change position, but I think the fact that I halted him is quite miraculous. Old men in their eighties are like dried cement.

When I say that I’m becoming more racist, more sexist, and more whatever, it’s not that I’m becoming my grandfather, an eighty year old, it’s that I’m moving past the ability to speak about these things within the same paradigm as people of a younger generation because the views and opinions and conclusions I have come to about race are based on evidence that I’ve gathered prior to the frame-of-reference than those that are now controlling the argument about race. Or gender. Or women’s rights. Therefore, my thoughts are already outdated. But the fear of sounding bigoted stops many people from talking.

I have no such fear.

Because just as my mother calls me cold and unfeeling and I know it to be untrue, so are the accusations that I am bigoted. Nobody will advocate for me and my character, I must do it myself.