Family Dynamics
In my opening blog I tried to give a flavor of my growing up and educational professional journey so you could see if my background might make it likely that some of my insights might be valuable to you. In this blog I would like to discuss my family dynamics to further enlighten you so you might understand where my attitudes and values originate. I have already mentioned that my immediate family was raised Catholic although my father was not Catholic. It is also true that my extended family was raised Catholic. All of my aunts and uncles and cousins lived either continuously or sporadically in my same small town.
Life in a mining town
The town was a company mining town nestled in a valley with a river running through it and everything depended on the mine for economic survival. Without it the town eventually withered and almost died after I moved away. While I lived there it was a highly polluted town with smelter smoke billowing constantly into the air destroying all the vegetation on the local hillsides and mine tailings polluting the river that ran through it so that it was called Lead Creek after its gray color. Everyone was subjected to constant air pollution but it was simply the price we all paid to live in a mining town and no one thought much about it! Many years after I left it became a super fund site cleaned up by the federal government! But I digress this blog is to introduce you to my family!
As I said previously all my extended family lived in town. It was a town of immigrants mostly Italian and Irish who came to make a better life in America. It was also a fiercely union town and had its share of nasty strikes and confrontations! My paternal grandfather was a Cornish miner who had come to work in the mines in 1911. My grandmother and my father followed him in 1913 when my father was three. Together my father and his mom traveled by boat across the Atlantic and by train across the U.S. and settled with my grandfather in Wardner, Idaho on my father’s fourth birthday.
My grandfather continued as a miner until his death in 1949! My grandmother was a stay at home mom who raised my father and his brother who was born in 1917. Both my father and his brother worked for the mining company in different capacities their entire working lives. My uncle’s second wife, my aunt, who was a younger sister of my mom, was a stay at home mom who developed cancer in the early 50s when she had two small children.
She was given months to live but refused to die and kept her promise to live to see her children become adults! She died in the early 70s. Because she had married my uncle who was divorced she was not allowed to receive the sacraments although she continued to attend church regularly! Their two children, my double cousins, both remained in town as adults. My female cousin became a teacher and dedicated her life to it as well as to caring for various of our aunts and grandparents as they aged!
She surely qualifies for sainthood! Her brother joined the army and served in Viet Nam and like so many of his comrades he came back a shattered person and though he married and had two kids he never really got his act together and died of a heart attack at 59!
My mother’s father was an Irish bricklayer who did brickwork in town and also for the mining company. Her mom was also a stay at home mom who had 8 kids with my mom being the oldest. One daughter died two days after birth and one son was killed when he was hit by a car while riding his bike when he was twelve! The next oldest child after my mother was an aunt who married three times. Her first husband was abusive and was found one day lying dead in the river cause of death never determined. Her second husband was in the service and while stationed in Alaska got the base commander’s daughter pregnant and divorced my aunt on orders from his superior! Her third husband was a mine assayer like my father and they remained married until his death!
She never had children. The next child was my aunt who I mentioned above married to my dad’s brother. Then came my uncle who was like his father a bricklayer but who when he was fifty got his degree and became part of the mine’s administrative team working in labor relations. He was married with two children a boy and a girl. The boy was mentally retarded and lived at home until his late twenties which put a great strain on the relationship which ended in divorce when the boy was placed in a home when he was in his late twenties.
This uncle also served on the board of the local hospital where both my mother and my aunt her youngest sister, worked as nurses. When there was a labor dispute at the hospital my mom and my aunt were on opposite sides from my uncle in the dispute which caused family discord! My aunt the nurse was never married because the only love of her life ended up becoming a priest! My youngest uncle was an electrician and was married with five kids!
All of my aunts and uncles smoked and drank and family gatherings would often end up in shouting matches!
My immediate family
My immediate family consisted of my mother, the Registered Nurse, my father, the mine assayer and me and four siblings. My parents both being the oldest in their families were the go to source of conflict resolution and emergency help! They were also very involved in the community and admired by their friends and associates. We were lucky to be raised by them!
My oldest brother graduated from Gonzaga University in 1962 and after some kicking around became a teacher first in middle school and then in high school where he taught mostly English and History and was loved by his students. In fact he ended up marrying one of his students and they had 3 kids! After retiring he was a prolific poster on Facebook and had an extensive following among his many students! He died of ca combination of heart and kidney disease in 2023.
My oldest sister spent her teenage years as the in charge person in our household once our mother went back to work. She was very active at church where she played the organ at both Sunday masses for many years! She graduated from Gonzaga in 1964 with a degree in mathematics and a teaching credential and taught math for 40 years in a Sacramento area high school until she retired. She met and married a fellow math teacher from the school and they had a daughter.
They were married for almost 50 years until his death from a brain condition! He was thought to have had dementia but a brain autopsy revealed it as a hardening of the hippocampus with the resulting symptoms mimicking dementia! His condition and subsequent 19 year fight with his condition led my sister to get involved with the Alzheimer’s Association where to this day she continues to facilitate a support group and be a resource for those on that journey including myself!
My second sister after graduating high school went to a business school and then worked for several different companies over her lifetime. She married a local dentist and they adopted two kids and then he abandoned them when the children were toddlers leaving her as a single mother! He never paid child support and she struggled to raise her children. She lacked basic maternal instincts and her children suffered because of it. They both were in and out of the legal system but have found their way to become productive adults in spite of the lack of parenting they encountered.
My younger brother after graduating high school in 1966 enlisted in the Navy hoping to avoid combat in Viet Nam. Instead the Navy made him a corpsman and sent him to Viet Nam with the Marines where he saw all the gruesomeness that is war! He came home broken like his cousin I mentioned earlier and he never fully recovered suffering from PTSD. He married and had two children and he became a LVN, He worked with children at the psych ward in a local hospital and then he worked with the homeless delivering medical attention to them. He became a county conservator but never ever fully recovered from his war experience which led him to alcohol and substance abuse and he died on his 60th birthday way too soon!
The family we built
As for me I married a fellow teacher from my first middle school in Sacramento and we have two beautiful sons and one grandson! We have been married 52 years and counting but she is suffering from dementia and is now living in a care facility and I am now on my second journey known as The Long Goodbye!
More about that in my next blog where I hope to be able to provide some insights into making this journey with fellow travelers and to begin an ongoing discussion with anyone out there who reads my blog and wants to interact! Hopefully we can be of support to one another! But also remember I hope to be able to discuss many things I have learned along my journey so far and not just The Long Goodbye!
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