James’s Comments (group member since Oct 04, 2010)

James’s comments from the Claire LaZebnik Hosts a Q and A group.

I was eleven, and my brothers were seven and six. He had a closer relationship with me than with either of my brothers, although those relationships were very positive too. I think it was just a matter of personality type - as a teenager, even when Mom was baffled by whatever I was doing or saying, it was as if he could just look at my face and read my mind, and vice versa more and more once I was an adult and started adding more life experiences to my resume.

He was a very kind and gentle man, though not very expressive of pain when he was hurting; a product of his times in that way - he was born in 1923 and remembered the Depression and the displaced folks from the Dust Bowl coming through on their way to California, and was in the Navy for World War II. Although he hated guns, he was the gunnery officer on his ship, and since the ship was too small to rate a doctor or even a corpsman, he had the medical books and the job of deciding whether anyone who was sick or injured needed to be moved to a hospital ship. So he had a lot of conditioning to be the stoic type. But he taught my mom a lot about gentleness; her love for us was infinite, but sometimes she had the personality of a flamethrower, and he got her to look at that and turn the flamethrower off.

I feel that I've spent most of my adult life trying to become more like him. He and my mom were my heroes, my role models, and my best friends.

That sounds interesting, and I can relate to part of what you're describing: when I was growing up my father was a monster - no exaggeration - but I had a great relationship with my stepfather (and my mom), and he (my stepdad) was much closer with my brothers and me than he was with his own four daughters from his first marriage. When he died, I was holding one of his hands and one of my brothers was holding the other, and the daughters were AWOL though three of the four were in town.