Wednesday, Jan. 11, 7:05 p.m. My son:
Dad the vids you sent my gosh.
The one of the mountains that you capture rippling over the country side for miles is amazing. How are you holding up?
7:24 p.m. Just tried to call you.
7:26 p.m. Things are not well. I don’t know if I will be able to talk tonight.
Thursday, Jan. 12, 7:43 a.m. Former:
Oh no…
10:29 a.m. My son:
Oh my gosh 😢
10:30 a.m. My son:
What’s happened??
Call when you can.
10:59 a.m. Former:
Not trouble with you and [big brother] I hope??? 🤞🙏
12:24 p.m. My daughter:
☹️
12:27 p.m. No. Not [big brother] and me. Or me and anybody. We just came back from the service and, all I can say today (subject to change without notice) is whatever he is to others I will not forsake him. Last night I could have forsaken him. This has been such a bizarre experience.
...
6:35 p.m. This family needs group therapy, I’ll ya!. This has been one of the most surreal experiences of my life. Everyone has left now besides the two boys, S-1 and S-2, me and big brother, and they all left on good terms so all’s well that ends well I guess I don’t know.
6:36 p.m. Former:
What??? After all these cliff hanging between the lines teasers??? It’s alls well that ends well? Good grief! 😂
I’ve been a wreck all day.
6:40 p.m. … Last night was a nightmare. Maybe all’s well that ends well overstates it. I’ll take “They all left without further nightmares”. …I will explain fully when I am back.
6:48 p.m. …I’m not being coy deliberately or for dramatic effect. I just cannot talk until I get back. I can tell you a “good” surrealism. [Big brother] wanted me by his side, to the exclusion of children and his other brother, all day, and I was. It made me feel at times uncomfortable and at all times it was surreal. His children, to a child, [3 of the 5] have attached themselves to me intimately. I have never been told “I love you” so many times by so many people—WHO I HAVEN’T KNOWN FOR 50 YEARS!
6:59 p.m. I am coming back when scheduled on the 14th if I have to HITCHHIKE back!😂I can tell you what happened but not why or otherwise interpret or understand it. What I learned and saw for myself last night was the severest shock, as I expressed last night. I can analogize it to [an in-law of my Former] finding out that his aunt was his mother and vice versa—it’s very similar to that. I can only ride this out until I can escape. I don’t know what I am going to do about the future in my relations with [my big brother] and his kids. I am spooked.
7:02 p.m. Former:
Oh my God this is now O. Henry esque!
7:04 p.m. Former:
Or Edgar Allen Poe???
7:08 p.m. If any of you think our family [Former, her boyfriend, my son and daughter] is “dysfunctional” or “unorthodox” you will think that “Nevermore”.😂
7:09 p.m. Former:
😭That’s the best part about visiting other families. You get to totally recalibrate your own family almost always for the better! 😂
7:11 p.m. Oh my God yes. The rub is the most prominent branch of my own tree. I do love them, in a Harris way, I do care about them, ditto, and I do wish I was a Smith.
7:15 p.m. “Once upon a funeral dreary…” “Three Weddings and a funeral”? The funeral service was beautiful, the best part. Which…
[Sister-in-law], and I don’t know, maybe a lot more than that, were laid to rest today.
7:26 p.m. Thank you for bring stability and normalcy to my life😂🤣
8:02 p.m. Facts not acts. [I provided them some bio sketches] I’ll relate the behavior. It is shocking and I had no idea—in fact, the opposite.
Friday, Jan. 13, 8:54 a.m. Everybody gone now but [big brother] and me. I’m going to help him with finances…[Which was another special attention (and one that he risks regret but once and that is continuously).]
3:58 p.m. Just came back from about a 2.5 hr road trip. Went to Barnesboro and Garmantown.
He’s tired now, I could hear it in his voice coming back, and he admitted he was tired. I hope he’ll take a nap.
4:39 p.m. It is so bleak here now, dead of winter and total silence inside. The people all left, all but S-1 and S-2, last night, and all at once. Then S-1 and S-2 left this morning and Crazy House has turned into Bleak House. My head is so messed up.
4:42 p.m. It is so strange. This whole trip has been so strange.
4:59 p.m. Former:
Is [big brother] going to be alright alone? Does he now live alone since his wife died?
6:22 p.m. Alone, yes. And I am very concerned about that. Not only the bleakness although that is huge now that his wife has passed. You all know me, I have never been lonely a day in my life. He is used to the northern winters and rural living but this is still different and I don’t know if even Benjamin-I-am-an-Island Harris could live alone in the house I lived in for 53 years alone.
He’s also 82. If he fell or had some acute med. incident, he’d die. He’d die, there’s noone around. One or more of his kids comes just about every weekend he said, but still. He’d die.
Bleak House was just relieved for a few minutes by a call from D-1 to me. Big brother and I were in the middle of talking about her. I was gingerly creeping toward the subject, I don’t get any kernel of sense that I could approach the other problems and had to pause when I said, “If something happened to her…” So she called at that moment just to say good night to me and to say that she wants [all of us] to get together, ...I told her “I am going to call you every couple of days and I am going to put it on my calendar,” and I did.
###
From about 4:30 until about 6:30 the captain sat and I stood in the kitchen talking. I had so much in my mind about his kids but I knew that I could not speak to him about them directly. I said only generally that they were all so wonderful but that I was worried about D-1. That was when I said “If anything happens to her…” and broke. He got up and came over to me and hugged and kissed me. I opened the subject carefully with my mantra, “unconditional love”; “whoever and whatever you are, whoever and whatever you become if you change…” He was paying attention to me and repeated seemingly as a neumonic, “unconditional love”. “My sense is D-1 doesn’t have unconditional love and needs it”, I said. We didn’t go deeper into the weeds and at around 6:30 he retired.
###
8:06 p.m. [Big brother] went up to go to bed at 6:30, he gets up at 3 am. When I tell all of you the Mr. Hyde part of this story, I will tell you, it will break me up, but I will—I have begun writing the anecdotes to myself in a text as I remember them, the whole trip has been a schizoid nightmare/dream, you will be as profoundly disturbed as I was. Son, this is one of those things that makes me question reality as you and I have discussed. Very similar to [his uncle in-law’s] history that so shook him and I don’t know how he dealt with it and I don’t know what I am going to do with this.
###
The captain was in bed at 6:30 p.m. but I heard him call for his cat two or three times to come up to sleep with him but by 7:30 Bleak House was silent. I stayed alert until about 9 o’clock and then, confident that he was asleep, packed and showered. At about 9:30 I walked into the kitchen in my boxers and tee shirt and began eating some leftover barbecue chicken. I then heard some noises upstairs and noticed the second floor light had come on. I walked to the landing and gaped wide-eyed and mouth open full of chicken up the stairs at my big brother standing at the top in his bathrobe. “What are you doing?”, I asked, shocked. “I have some ideas about D-1 that I want to run by you,” and pointed up with his index finger for emphasis. I didn’t move and gaped as he sat in the automatic old-people’s chair lift down to the first floor. We went into the kitchen. He walked around the island and outlined his idea, emphasizing with his finger pointed up as I stood and turned, following him with my attention.
He had internalized my “unconditional love” mantra but then butchered it by adding a condition in his proposal for a joint approach to D-1. I reacted immediately and emphatically with a rejection that I would be no part of that “bullshit”, that if he, the father, wanted to take that bullshit approach I would be no part of it. I had never talked to the sergeant like that before and he had never talked to me like he promptly did. He immediately backed off. He accepted my correction. Another instance of special attention.
“You’re in it now and there are some things you have to know.” He then filled in D-1’s history for me, all new to me, all varying degrees of bad and I came to conclude, and articulated my conclusion that for my beloved D-1 “there is no way out.” It was the bleakest, most hopeless conclusion. He was literally falling asleep as we spoke and stood up to go back to bed and I thought to reinforce the “unconditional love” message as a final thought for the night with my forearms resting on his shoulders. “Unconditional love”, he repeated.
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10:06 pm.
Forget the encomium I tossed D-1’s husband’s way. This is a nightmare that I do not know that I can ever wake up from. “If anything happens to D-1…” There is no way out for her. Behind every door there’s a monster. I want to kidnap her to just get her away from everything. Oh my God. I will be back tomorrow.
Jan. 14, 9:32 a.m. I’M FREE!
