Family Ties

What happens when siblings remember their parents differently? Dad was abusive. No, he was charismatic.

The truth is, he was both. What’s different is not so much our memories, as our willingness to accept the effect he had on us.

Many of us worshiped our fathers. All the more so if they were out of the house a lot and when they were home swung between playing with us and lecturing us, sometimes with a red face and a wagging finger.

B.F. Skinner first demonstrated that inconsistent rewards produce the strongest reinforcement of behavior. If you’re never quite sure whether you will win a parent’s approval, you try all the harder for it.

That explains a lot about how young children and adolescents relate to mercurial parents. As we age, we become able to see a parent’s erratic behavior for what it is, and stop seeing it as a reflection on our own worth. We learn that parents who periodically rage at children are the ones with the problem, not the children.

But what happens if you are a child of such a parent and he dies before you have come to that mature understanding of his behavior? Your emotional response to it is frozen in the time of your adolescence. 

When your siblings say, “You know, Dad was a little crazy,” you might offer that being a little crazy is the flip side of brilliance. The adult in you cannot hide from the fact of his inappropriate behavior, but the child in you still sees it as part of his bright sun, the one you longed to be in the warmth of.

The trouble comes when a sibling tells you that he hurt him. Emotionally and physically. Or your mother tells you he hurt her, emotionally and physically.

What do you do with that information?

Impugn the source, likely as not. He was weak. She was unstable. Secretly you might even tell yourself they deserved it. They weren’t as strong as you. He didn’t love them as much as he did you. It’s wrong for them to attack his memory. He can’t fight back, so you do it for him.

Families are a separate thing from the people who make them up. They don’t exist except in relation to one another. The good memories may be there, but the bad ones always come up. As William Faulkner said, “The past is never dead. It isn’t even past.”

When these dynamics are at play, it may be too hard to keep going back over the past. Nothing is solved. Old wounds are ripped open and bleed as freshly as when first inflicted.

We’ve been taught that nothing is more important than family. Maybe that’s so. But it may also be true that sometimes family is not as important as the individuals in it.

How Much Am I Worth?

I recently wrote about medical treatments I would be receiving. I said I was grateful to live near a first-class medical center and to have medicare to pay for it all. I lamented that so many others do not.

I finished those treatments and got the bill. Or, actually, I did not get a bill. Instead, I got statements from medicare and my medigap insurer about how much was charged by the hospital and doctors and how much they were paid. My share of the payments was zero.

So, that’s great, right? Well, I suppose. For me.

As I write this, the nation has once again reached its debt ceiling. Now Congress will fight over raising it. Fiscal conservatives will demand spending cuts, targeting programs like medicare. I don’t agree with their tactics—and certainly not their rhetoric and factual distortions—but we need more rational discussion about how we raise money (taxes) and how we spend it.

My treatments were billed by the hospital and doctors at over $500,000. Under medicare, the providers got paid about five percent of what they charged. (My private medigap insurance paid another one percent.) They accepted that. As I said, I owe nothing.

Great program, right? A ninety-five percent discount. Let’s do that for everyone. By that reckoning Medicare For All would be dirt cheap.

Of course, it wouldn’t be. Our national system of healthcare providers may be charging too much, but they could not take a ninety-five percent haircut and stay in business. In a health system that covered everyone, reimbursements would have to be greater, which would raise the cost to government, which would have to raise taxes to pay for the added cost, or cut services.

You can’t get anything repaired today for less than market rates, not well anyway, and not for long. Plumbing, electricity, roofs, kidneys, lungs, hearts. When it comes time for a new water heater, we have to make choices. If our budget is tight, something less important might have to wait.

The same is true of healthcare. We see that reality in every country that has free healthcare for its citizens. As The Rolling Stones said, “You can’t always get what you want...”

As our population ages, we are spending more and more of our healthcare dollars on old folks like me. The question is obvious: are we worth it?

Even in a country as prosperous as ours, we don’t have boundless resources. We have to make choices about where to invest. In a child of five with many years ahead of her, or in a man of seventy five, who is coming to the end of the line?

Every human life is worth something. None is worthless. But is each one worth the same investment from the public treasury?

When put in those terms, the question answers itself.