There Go my Whole Frame, Outlook, Way of Life, and Everything

I had a fascinating online conversation today. I communicated with a cousin I have only seen a few times in my life.

I do not have a Facebook account, and I count myself blessed for that. My dad didn’t cancel his account after he became demented, and I thought it might be handy to preserve it, so when I got rid of his Twitter account, I left Facebook alone. On occasion, people he knows say things on his timeline. He had a birthday not long ago, and he got messages from a high school friend, a former partner, and a niece. I will say her name is Martha.

I blew off the messages from the school friend and the former partner. I didn’t see the point in encouraging them. I decided I should acknowledge Martha’s post, however. I sent a Facebook message explaining that I didn’t post things publicly, and I thanked her and so on. She messaged me back, and we started talking.

Her mother–my Aunt Norma–was my dad’s older sister. She died at age 82, in 2014. Like my dad, she had vascular dementia. I drove my dad to the funeral in Tennessee. Actually, we flew to Atlanta and drove from there to Oak Ridge. At the funeral, I talked to Martha. My dad was not diagnosed until 2015, but I knew his memory was fading. I wanted to learn about Norma’s illness, in case my dad turned out to have the same thing.

Norma died pretty quickly. You would expect a woman to outlast her brother, but Norma was even fatter than my dad. She may not have had the same grade of health care, either.

Norma’s history is complicated. Her first husband was a man from the town in Kentucky where she and my dad grew up. They had a daughter I will call Lulu. Norma got a divorce, and she married my uncle, a man I will call Melvin. Martha is his daughter from an earlier marriage. He also had several sons. In the end, the household was made up of Melvin, Norma, Lulu, the sons (I’m not sure of their names even though they’re my first cousins), and Martha. After Martha was an adult, Norma and Melvin had their first child together. I will call her Dagmar.

Martha was the last child from Melvin’s first marriage. She never knew her mother. I don’t know if she died in childbirth or what. Maybe she just ran off.

You can tell I’m not close to these people. I don’t know much about them. I’m not sure it’s right to call Martha my cousin. We are not related by blood.

After my mother had her first child, she was surprised that her husband’s mother and sisters didn’t come to help her out. Eventually, one of the sisters let her know that they were distant because they were so glad they didn’t have to deal with my dad any more. I have had very little contact with my dad’s relatives.

I barely know Martha, but on the few times we have communicated, we have had a special rapport. I remember a family picnic back in the Sixties; we went off by ourselves, away from the hard voices and quick hands, and talked. She is a gentle person with a kind heart. That means she’s not much like Norma or Melvin. Norma was a lot like my dad, meaning she was abusive, and Melvin is a spoiled Ahab figure who treated his kids like pack mules.

I was not interested in trying to get to know Martha when I sent her the message, but she isn’t like me, so she responded quickly and started engaging me. We had a long messaging session, and I learned a lot of fascinating things.

First of all, the rest of my dad’s family didn’t know we had a domestic violence problem. I guess when I was a kid I assumed the whole world knew. Martha had to ask me about it, so I told her some horror stories. She surprised me by letting me know Norma (her real first name) used to beat her black and blue.

I never would have guessed. I knew Norma was mean to her kids, but I had never heard anything about physical abuse. I have seen Norma rap her kids on the head with her knuckles, and that’s not an acceptable method of corporal punishment, but I didn’t know she beat Martha.

Norma hated Martha for some reason. She was mean to all the kids, but she really laid it on Martha. In addition to the beatings, she showered her with verbal abuse and humiliated her.

After Martha grew up, Norma told her something amazing. At one point during Martha’s childhood, Norma tried to murder Martha. When she told the story to the adult Martha, she said Lulu persuaded her to stop. Lulu said that if Norma killed Martha, Norma would go to prison, and Lulu would be alone in the world. That stopped Norma. When Norma told Martha this, in her house with Martha’s four kids, she didn’t apologize or show remorse.

This is not a story about a white trash family that sold meth out of a stolen camper. Norma was a respected schoolteacher, and Melvin was a professor of radiation embryology. The problem wasn’t caused by a lack of education or sophistication. It sounds like Norma was a true sociopath who had a hard time understanding right and wrong.

Long ago, my sister told me a strange story about Norma and Lulu. She said Norma used to buy Lulu candy and have her eat it in front of Melvin’s kids.

Melvin was not a great dad. He made his kids pay for their own clothes. He and Norma made them do all the housework. He refused to let Martha go to the doctor when she was sick, forcing her to go to school instead. He didn’t protect her from Norma.

His kids grew up to be independent and hardworking but also full of unnecessary pain.

While I was conversing with Martha, I learned some things about my dad’s father, who died in 1942.

There is a fable about my grandfather (it feels strange to call him that). It goes like this: He died from pneumonia or food poisoning. Later on, the pastor of the church his kids attended told Norma to stand up and tell the congregation her dad died from drinking bad liquor. The pastor was wrong.

I always thought the fable was true, and I thought it explained my dad’s hatred of Christianity. I believed something other than liquor killed my grandfather.

Here is what Martha told me: my grandfather used to get drunk and beat my grandmother. My aunts and my grandmother told Martha about it. He died from uremia caused by drinking bad moonshine.

Moonshine can contain chemicals that injure or destroy kidneys, so uremia could be explained by bad moonshine. Uremia just means your blood is full of urine ingredients. If your kidneys quit working, you get uremia.

The pastor was right about the cause of death. He wasn’t a slanderer. He was just an enormous clod.

Melvin is a Mormon, and Norma joined up, but she was really an atheist. My dad was an atheist for nearly all of his life, and although he asked for salvation in September, I don’t think he really believes at this moment. I wonder if sociopathy is the main reason for their problems with God. Sociopaths think everything they do is right. How can you want or ask for forgiveness if you don’t believe you’ve sinned?

It sounds like my grandfather may have been a sociopath. I wonder. He was not stupid. He educated himself as well as he could, and he went into politics and provided well for his family. It’s not like he grew up in a shack with a chicken tied to the kitchen table. His father had a lot of property, and almost all of his mother’s children went to college. He knew better than to beat his wife.

I also learned that my dad’s remaining sister has Parkinson’s and dementia. She looks better than my dad, but then women dye their hair and wear wigs and makeup.

I’m very glad I talked to Martha. My only other sources of information on the family are my dad, who is demented and in denial, and my sister, who is a compulsive liar.

My dad thinks his father was a saintly man everyone admired. At least that’s what he pretends to believe.

Tonight I told my dad I had talked to Martha. He had no idea who she was. He took a minute to remember her dad, whom he has known since 1962, and he could not recall his last name.

I told him his remaining sister has Parkinson’s and dementia. My feeling is that he needs to hear things like this so he can come to grips with his mortality and secure his salvation. It may sound cruel, but my dad is not the kind of person who would feel alarm over a sister’s dementia. He didn’t start crying and talking about how he loved her. He wasn’t upset when Norma died. The only thing that really bothers him about his sister’s predicament is that it reminds him of his own situation.

I did not tell him I found out his dad died from drinking moonshine, and I didn’t say I knew he beat my grandmother. I may mention it one of these days, just to see if it gets a reaction. It may offend him, but I don’t care about that. When a truth is important, you say it, and you don’t accept responsibility for the way other people receive it. Besides, he would probably forget about it later the same day.

Sociopaths feel little or no remorse, and they apologize rarely, if at all. My feeling is that Norma and my sister are in the category of hard core sociopaths, and my dad is on a slightly lower level. Maybe if he hears a little bit about the bad things his dad and his sister did, it might jar something loose and make him consider his own sins.

As a Christian, I assume there must be a demonic component to sociopathy. Either it indicates demonic control, or demons are attracted to young sociopaths and set up house in them. Serial killers, the best-known sociopaths apart from building contractors and telemarketers, often say they felt foreign presences driving them.

Can you fix a sociopath by casting a demon out? I don’t know. I believe a person who enjoys being evil and approves of it will continue to do evil regardless of whether a demon is present.

A person who wrote a convincing account of a visit to hell said there were people there who, in spite of the flames and torture, still hated God and refused to accept responsibility; they were basically sociopaths. They could not connect their suffering with their moral failings.

They were not full of demons. In hell, demons aren’t invisible beings that live in you and influence you in sneaky ways. They’re visible there, because people in hell are spirits, just like demons. Spirits can see each other. In hell, demons live outside of you; they don’t hide inside you and whisper all day. Presumably, whatever personality you have in hell is 100% you.

Martha has four successful married kids and 13 grandchildren, so it looks like she overcame her background. She says Melvin has a bad attitude toward her family and complains that she praises them too much. He says he still puts her down. She thinks he has always resented her for not being male. I told her it looked like she had a fine legacy and did not need his approval.

Martha is a very nice person. She is also a serious Mormon. When everyone got together for Norma’s funeral, I overheard Martha talking about the Lamanites. This is the Morman term for American Indians. They think Indians are descended from the Hebrews, which is pretty incompatible with modern DNA data. You can’t believe the preposterous Lamanite story without being a very sincere Mormon.

It’s terrible that she is caught up in the cult. I prayed for her, but I don’t see how I can talk to her about Mormonism.

Melvin raised his daughter as a Mormon, but he doesn’t buy into it, himself. A long time ago, he and Norma went to their high priest or whatever Mormons call their clergymen, and they told him they didn’t believe. The high priest told them to stick around for the social life. It’s too bad the pitch that didn’t work on Melvin and Norma succeeded with Martha. One more thing they did to mess up her life.

Now I know my grandfather died from drinking bad moonshine, and I know the abuse problem in my family is even worse than I believed. I won’t whine about it. It’s good information to have.