My family is painfully, preternaturally polite. We are not the kind of people who have ugly scenes over dinner; not for us the family feuds and emotional meltdowns that, for some families, seem to sprout like mushrooms during the Holidays. We avert our eyes and smile tightly when confronted with emotion, and change the subject. We were raised to believe that if you can’t say something nice you should say nothing at all, so even though we talk quite a bit, we often say nothing at all.
I mention this because at Christmas dinner my older brother remarked that he needed immediate bypass surgery. There was a moment of shocked silence until my younger brother, who had bypass surgery three years ago, mentioned that he hoped the weather remained nice through the weekend. The moment passed.
My mother has always believed that she and my father were good parents because they never interfered in their kids’ lives. “The only way to hold your tongue is to bite your tongue,” she would say. But to what end? My older sister’s first husband had a ferocious temper which he thoroughly enjoyed; he managed the ruin every holiday gathering he ever attended while my parents looked at the floor and smiled tight, uncomfortable little smiles.
My younger brother had a bypass before he was 45; we all sent flowers and blamed our family history but no one mentioned that since he weighed well over 300 pounds, perhaps he bore some of the responsibility. He has actually gained more weight since the bypass, but we smile fondly and remark on his man-sized appetite because “obese” is an ugly word. At his heart, my sister’s husband was probably a good man, but we spent 30 years tiptoeing around him and no one ever suggested that his extreme anger was not natural and not healthy, at least not before he dropped dead of an aneurysm over brunch one Easter Sunday.
And the saga continues with my older brother. We can blame our family history all we want but the reality is that “family history” is polite fiction because in reality he is too heavy. The reality is that he drinks like a fish and smokes like a chimney. The reality is that at Christmas dinner, surrounded by his siblings and his grown children no one asked him how he felt about having bypass surgery or what he was going to do to have a healthier lifestyle. We passed the wine and talked about the weather instead.
“The only way to hold your tongue is to bite it.” Of all the things that our parents taught us, that phrase somehow sums up our family’s history. We’ll be at the hospital, offering unconditional love and silent support during the operation and you’ll never see stiffer upper lips. But none of us will say what we are thinking, as if the best way to heal a brother’s faulty heart is to deny we have one of our own.