I swear, I had the best of
intentions to break blog silence of more than a month by writing about something
upbeat. Or, at least not so damn dark.
I mean, last time I wrote
about my firm belief that that everything we cherish about human life soon will
cease to exist—possibly within our lifetime. Surely within the lives of the
children of those who took the losing gamble
of bringing kids into a doomed world.
After that post, I’m sure my
readership (I like that word because it suggests a vast following) was
screaming into their computer screens, “Lighten up, man! We expect end-times
talk from guys with signs on street corners—or from that buzz-kill trio with
megaphones outside Nationals Park this past season. Stick with what you do best,
Ries: complaining about shit in a self-effacing but amusing way, with a stray
optimistic thought sometimes thrown in.”
I heard you, imagined voices!
I really did. In fact, I had a post planned in my head that would talk about
all the senior citizens I’ve volunteer-visited over the years. About how I
never really know what they’re all about, because by the time I enter their
lives their memories are failing and/or the narratives they’ve constructed over the
decades have calcified into their own reality. A reality that may be the truth, but that in many key respects probably isn’t.
So, OK, it wasn’t going to be
a happy piece, exactly. But it was
going to have a bittersweet tone. Note that “sweet” is part of that.
What had brought all of that
to mind was the recent experience of my friend Bob. Or, rather, his recent experience as told by him.
Bob is 92, and in many
respects his mind remains sharp—as evidenced by the fact that he’s always
asking me if I’ve yet ordered on Amazon that CD or transistor radio or talking
watch for him that my younger and theoretically sharper brain has completely
forgotten about. Bob recently lost his only surviving sibling, a sister who was
only 80, to brain cancer. He’d known she was dying, and had spoken to her on
the phone many times during the months of her decline. But, as Bob tells the
story, he didn’t learn of her death until two days after the fact—and then was
prevented from attending the service, which was local, by his sister’s only
child. This woman is in her 50s. Bob describes her as “liking to control things.”
According to Bob, the
daughter wouldn’t tell him where the service was being held, even after he
told her he could get a ride. He then appealed to his late sister’s husband,
who Bob has long characterized to me as reticent and ineffectual. The
brother-in-law shruggingly responded, Bob said, that he was “between the devil
and the deep blue sea” in this matter—the implication being that his own
daughter was the devil and that he risked sleeping with the fishes were he to tell
Bob where and when the funeral service was being held.
My first and natural instinct
was to mourn for my elderly friend who’d lost his last remaining family member
and closest confidante—they spoke at least weekly on the phone, and she
sometimes came to visit, bearing new shirts and pants and other items that her
nearly blind and ambulatorily unsteady brother couldn’t shop for himself. Not
only had he lost her, but he’d had no closure on her death—no funeral service,
no chance to mourn with a community of family and friends who’d loved his sister,
too. Not even a program or memorializing obituary to which he could cling. If
the latter existed, I couldn’t find it anywhere on the Internet.
Bob was able to cull from the
brother-in-law that his sister’s ashes had been scattered on a section of Delaware’s
Rehoboth Beach that is reserved for such purposes. So, no cemetery to visit,
either. I’m loath to drive Bob anywhere because he’s so feeble, and I haven’t
done so for years. But I would’ve gladly driven him to his sister’s grave site, were
she to have had one.
I’d better get to the point,
because right now I’m telling you about what I was going to write about today, and I haven’t yet gotten around to
what I am going to address.
To make a long story shorter,
I e-mailed a niece of Bob’s—the daughter of a brother of his who died 30 years
ago—to inform her of her aunt’s death and her uncle’s loss, if she didn’t know
already. Which I figured was distinctly possible, given that this niece, too,
lives locally, but she’s seen Bob in the flesh exactly once, to my knowledge,
in the many years I’ve known him. In fact, I had served as go-between for that lone meeting, which struck me as odd at the time. But, whatever.
So, the niece e-mailed me
back. She’d had no idea her aunt had died. She thanked me for letting her know.
She said that she would write “Bobby” a note of condolence. Within her short reply,
she also referenced her family’s indifference to her “outreach” efforts in the
years since her father’s death. She alluded to “strange family dynamics.”
No kidding! It was then that
I fully realized something that I’d already been thinking about at some level: I
know nothing about the Bob who preceded our acquaintance. I know the outlines—his
long marriage; how he tended to his wife in her Alzheimer’s years; his career
as a bank teller and later, in semi-retirement, as a seller of fine pens;
stories here and there about his family and his schooling; hobbies such as his
lifelong love of watches. (I’ve worn a hole in the carpets of a jeweler in
Alexandria buying new batteries for his vast array of timepieces. Or, I did,
until his eyesight deteriorated to the point where he no longer can tell when
time stands still.)
But what do I really know
about Bob? About his familial relationships, for instance? How do I know that he
didn’t somehow make himself persona non grata with his sister’s family? Why,
for that matter, has the one niece with whom I’ve communicated largely snubbed Bob
in the years that I’ve known him? I used to simply assume that she’s a self-centered
bitch. But perhaps Bob had been among those family members who’d been insufficiently
“there” for her upon her father’s death and had then rejected her overtures.
Twice in e-mails this niece has
written to me “He’ll always be Bobby to me.” Why? What does that mean? So, I
asked her. In an e-mail, I also asked if she has any idea what the real story might be about the alleged
funeral-service snub. I conceded that it’s really none of my business, but added that
I’d like to be able to sort out—or at least have some insight into—an elderly
friend’s past, for a change.
I’ve run into this
many times, and it always drives me a little crazy. Why? Yes, my wife is
right—I’m nosy as hell. But also, I like these people. I care about
them. But I see only a single puzzle piece of their totality. I wonder what the
big picture once looked like. I wonder what my elderly friends loved and
loathed in their prime, what they cared about the most. Who they were, when they were fully themselves—as opposed to the diminished and
circumscribed fragments of themselves that I now see before me.
Just to name a few of them,
there was Helen, who’d been a nurse and a doctor’s wife and an avid tennis player
and swimmer, but whose divorce, progressively debilitating MS, and bouts with cancer had rendered her
bitter and cantankerous (to be kind) by the time we met, but who lit up when talking about the fine arts and her travel days, and who always thanked me for
coming. There was Phyllis, who’d put her heart and soul into raising her three
boys, but couldn’t remember much about them to tell me. They and I finally met
at her memorial service, where they regarded me warily, as if fearing I was
about to become rich in a recently rewritten will.
There was Marianthe, who’d
run a Greek restaurant in DC back in the day with her late husband, and who was
mortal assisted-living enemies with Augusta, whose son in California either was
a saint or a bastard, depending on whether Augusta or the man’s son was telling
the story. And there was Jean, who’d once helped Rachel Carson research Silent Spring, and who dreamily invited
me to her family’s island retreat on the St Lawrence River at a time when it
was clear that she herself never would see it again.
Bob’s niece didn’t reply to
my e-mail. Which was neither surprising nor in any way offensive, given the
buttinsky nature of my request.
Anyway, what all this is meant to say is
that I’d planned to make this entire blog post about the strangeness of time,
age, perception, family, and the role of the volunteer. It wasn’t going to
be an uplifting piece, but I was going to end it on a note of my affection for
all the seniors I’ve known in this capacity. I was going to emphasize that I
think of each of them often, and always fondly--for who they were in our
specific context, not for who they may really have been over the course of their lifetime. Even though, yes, I always end up wishing I’d known more about all that stuff.
Which would’ve made for, as I
noted several hundred words ago, a bittersweet post. But at least not a dark one,
coming on the heels of my subtly titled “Sing a Song of Armageddon” entry.
OK, I guess at this point I sort of have written that post, anyway. But now—and this part will
end up being way shorter than I’d planned it to be when I first sat down—here’s what’s topmost on my mind today, blog-wise.
Last Thursday, the media again
dug up Brad Bishop. Literally, sort of.
Surely you remember him. He’s
the guy who, in 1976, bludgeoned his wife, three sons and widowed mother to
death in their Bethesda home, piled the bodies into the family station wagon, burned
them in a shallow grave in northeastern North Carolina, later abandoned the car
in the Smoky Mountains, then infamously vanished into history. Given that he
was a State Department diplomat who spoke five languages and was an avid
outdoorsman, the thinking was that he might have hidden at first in a remote
area of Europe and later built himself a life overseas.
I first wrote about him in
June 2012, then returned to the subject in April of this year, when the FBI moved to heat up a very cold case by placing the now-78-year-old fugitive on its Ten
Most Wanted list. I admit to having a morbid fascination with killers, particularly those who pile on the bodies. It bums Lynn out and can put a real damper
on cocktail-party conversations. I often run by the former Bishop house, which
is just a few miles from my own, and I think about the murders, and Bishop, a
lot. Part of me enjoys imagining the scene of the Smartest Man in the Room
being ripped off of his comfy fireside chair in an Alpine ski lodge by an
Interpol SWAT team, being extradited back to Maryland, standing trial, and
ultimately spending what’s left of his dotage being anally penetrated in
prison.
But then, last week, a Washington Post headline screamed (OK,
it didn’t scream, but I nearly did when I read the story), “Exhumed Body in
Alabama Could Be Notorious Bethesda Fugitive Brad Bishop.” In a nutshell, a recent
re-airing of the case on CNN led to a tip that a “John Doe” who’d been struck
by a car and killed in Jackson County, Alabama, on October 18, 1981, looked remarkably
similar to Brad Bishop. The John Doe’s autopsy photo was pulled, and the likeness
was deemed compelling enough to dig up the casket. Forensic samples were sent
to the FBI lab in Quantico, Virginia. Where, within a few weeks, we’re told,
the case of the fugitive Brad Bishop may at last be solved.
Even if it is not resolved, in some senses. If the body is
Bishop’s, we’ll never know why he did it, or where he spent those five years
between the killings and his own death. For years I knew the street on which
the Bishop residence was located but not the house number. And I’d long thought that this was a head-scratching case of responsible-family-man-inexplicably-turned-savage-murderer.
But then all of a sudden my Google searches started turning up results they never used to. The house number suddenly was everywhere. (Prompting me this spring to
drive over there, take pictures, and make Lynn eye me more nervously that she had before.) Also,
the Internet now is rife with mentions of Bishop’s having been under
psychiatric care in the years before the murders. And also, of his having been a huge narcissist whose own
mother once had scolded him at a dinner party for his rudeness toward others,
and had warned him of a “comeuppance” that she might have lived to see, if her rude son hadn’t first crushed in her skull with a household tool.
So, if the body exhumed in
Alabama—which belonged, according to eyewitnesses, to a shambling, middle-aged-looking
man who was wearing several layers of clothing at the time he was killed—does
prove to be that of Brad Bishop, it shouldn’t come as any huge surprise.
Alabama isn’t terribly far from the Smoky Mountains, and the journey from one
place to the other may have been roughly as linear as might have been a mentally ill man’s
journey from respectability, to homicidal rage, to cognitive descent into foggy
homelessness and heedless perambulation.
But I have to concede, I’ll
feel some disappointment if that proves to be the case. Not that I’ve ever felt
that Brad Bishop deserved the decades of freedom I’ve imagined for him. But, rather,
because I relished thinking of him sitting pretty, smugly convinced that he’d
gotten away with murder, only to find that all his linguistic brilliance and
cunning couldn’t save him from justice in the end. (And I do mean “the end.”
See that earlier prison reference.)
Last week’s Washington Post story quoted a
now-retired State Department colleague of Bishop’s, Roy Harrell, on the matter of “comeuppance.” He says he was sitting at the dinner table with Bishop and his family in
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 1965 or 1966. The final line of the Post article was this:
“Regarding the possibility of
Bishop being run over by a car, Harrell said, ‘I would think that this is what
his mother referred to as his comeuppance.’”
Maybe. But I personally think
she would have preferred my scenario—self-proclaimed criminal mastermind rotting
in prison (there being no death penalty in Maryland)—rather than the image of
some addled bum shambling aimlessly down the road one second, dead the next.
See? That’s dark. But nowhere
near as dark as Armageddon. The Bishop story may even have a happy ending, depending on how you define such things.
