BETTE DAVIS EYES

 

          There was a time when the girls were five or six years old and we lived in the house on Lamar Street.  They did a little chorus line song and dance shtick, something copied from TV.  It was the cutest thing I had ever seen, then or since.  I quickly projected that they were beautiful and talented.  That they would go on to become big name entertainers, play to huge throngs of people and have their name in lights.  They would grow to adulthood together and be close like that all their lives.  They would support each other into old age long after their parents were gone.

It didn’t work that way at all.  They are both gone from me now.  I have, in essence, lost both of them.  One is living out of state and estranged from me.  The other took her own life twenty eight years ago today, April 22, 1985.  I would never be able to give her away as a bride should she choose to marry.  Never knowing the man she married and maybe even liking him.  Never holding her children---my grandchildren.

I remember long ago making funeral arrangements for a woman of great age.  Her children asked that I list by name among the survivors, a child who had died forty years before.  The newspaper didn’t want to print it until I insisted.  They took the attitude that the family should “Get over it”.  I understand much more now than when I was a younger man.

For years I lived with a constant, burning, all consuming rage.  Gone now except for searing nanoseconds of vignettes.  Images that come suddenly in the day or in the nights.  I don’t talk about it except in therapy but it never goes away.  Children should bury their parents.  Parents should not have to bury their children.