{"id":5453,"date":"2011-02-16T14:34:20","date_gmt":"2011-02-16T21:34:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=5453"},"modified":"2011-02-27T13:20:14","modified_gmt":"2011-02-27T20:20:14","slug":"family-secrets","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=5453","title":{"rendered":"Family Secrets"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"When I was young my father told me a story I’d never forget.\u00a0 It was about a cousin I’d never met, the son of my father’s younger brother in Nebraska.\u00a0 Still an infant, the boy started to run a fever.\u00a0 The fever climbed to 104\u00b0 and stayed there.\u00a0 Though my uncle and aunt didn’t yet know it was spinal meningitis, they knew their baby was in serious trouble, and they headed for the nearest hospital.\u00a0 By the time they got to the hospital the damage was done, and permanent: the child would never be able to care for himself, talk, understand his surroundings, or even recognize family members.\u00a0 In time, Uncle Fran and Aunt Shirley put him in an institution, where he would live the rest of his life.<\/p>\n

Our mentally-disabled cousin was a whispered family story, the kind you didn’t share with outsiders.\u00a0 Not that we ever talked much about it ourselves.\u00a0 Matter of fact, I didn’t even know my cousin’s name, but his story had scarred me for life: years later, when I was a young father myself, I’d start filling the bathtub with ice whenever either of my children started running a fever.<\/p>\n

Over the years I’d think of my cousin from time to time, though I didn’t know the first thing about him . . . where he was and what kind of institution he was in, how he was doing, whether his family visited . . . nothing.\u00a0 And because we Woodfords were all so reluctant to discuss sensitive family issues, I didn’t dare ask Uncle Fran or even my own father for details.\u00a0 I sensed it was a subject no one wanted raised.\u00a0 In recent years, I more or less assumed my cousin had passed on.<\/p>\n

And then Cousin Sue found me on Facebook and got in touch.\u00a0 Sue, one of Uncle Fran’s daughters, is Clark’s younger sister.\u00a0 Yes, his name is Clark, and his nickname is Spike (how cool is that?).\u00a0 Clark’s in his mid-50s, still institutionalized.\u00a0\u00a0 He never got better and is still unable to recognize or respond to anyone.\u00a0 He has a brain tumor now and may not live much longer.\u00a0 Sue sent photos.\u00a0 Clark looks just like my Uncle Fran.<\/p>\n

Cousin Sue, it turns out, has been the family go-between with the institution where Clark is housed.\u00a0 She recently set up a family visit with Clark, his mother, and his sisters.\u00a0 Sue has managed his care and has seen him often, but no one else had.\u00a0 Uncle Fran, who died a few years ago, never wanted Aunt Shirley to visit Clark, thinking it would just upset her.<\/p>\n

True, Clark wouldn’t have known his own mother in any case, but what a crying shame it is that my generation and my parents’ generation hid their disfigured, disabled, mentally ill, and mentally damaged children from the world and from themselves.\u00a0 I’m not saying Clark didn’t need to be institutionalized; he did and does.\u00a0 It’s the hiding that’s the shame: kids like Clark weren’t to be seen or talked about.\u00a0 Their very existence implied something lacking in their parents.\u00a0 Bless Cousin Sue for knowing better, and bless her for finally getting her mother back together with her son.\u00a0 Bless her too for sharing Clark’s story with me, and for sending me photos.\u00a0 And bless poor Clark.<\/p>\n

Family secrets.\u00a0 Another thing my father told me when I was young was that I was the only male Woodford who could carry on the family name.\u00a0 But in addition to Clark there was another male Woodford in my generation, my Uncle Fay’s son, who lived in Maryland.\u00a0 That cousin is about my age and there was and is nothing wrong with him.\u00a0 Although we met a few times when we were teenagers, we never stayed in touch, and I don’t know anything about him today other than that he’s still around somewhere.\u00a0 I don’t know if he ever had children, but he certainly could have had.\u00a0 So why did my father tell me that story?<\/p>\n

Uncle Fay is gone and so is my dad, so I can’t ask.\u00a0 But I sense another one of those generational family shame stories lurking in the background.\u00a0 Maybe my Maryland cousin dated a black girl once.\u00a0 Something like that would have gone down very poorly with my parents’ generation and with my father in particular, bless him.\u00a0 Of course I could be wrong about all this, too.\u00a0 Maybe that cousin had mumps as a kid.\u00a0 Who knows?<\/p>\n

Well, I’d like to know, and I’m working on it.\u00a0 Stand by for progress reports.<\/p>\n

Update (half an hour later):<\/strong><\/em><\/span> Well, how about that?\u00a0 I have a progress report already, thanks to my sister Mary.\u00a0 In addition to Cousin Clark, I have two male Woodford cousins, Bill and Mike, both sons of my Uncle Fay.\u00a0 Bill is unmarried, parental status unknown, but Mike is and has a grown son.\u00a0 My sister says our dad probably told me that story because he had won a family bet by being the first brother to have a son.\u00a0 So everything I speculated about just now is wrong, wrong, wrong.\u00a0 Gee, what else is new?<\/p>\n

And why didn’t my dad share all this with me?\u00a0 Did he somehow sense that I’d start blogging someday and spill all the family secrets?\u00a0 Yep, that’s probably it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When I was young my father told me a story I’d never forget.\u00a0 It was about a cousin I’d never met, the son of my father’s younger brother in Nebraska.\u00a0 Still an infant, the boy started to run a fever.\u00a0 The fever climbed to 104\u00b0 and stayed there.\u00a0 Though my uncle and aunt didn’t yet […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5453","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-personal"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5453","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5453"}],"version-history":[{"count":31,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5453\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5480,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5453\/revisions\/5480"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5453"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5453"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5453"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}