Respect

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Describe a positive thing a family member has done for you.

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About fifteen years ago, my siblings and I persuaded my parents to write down the story of their lives. Not memoirs. Not for publication. Just the memories and family truths that would otherwise disappear with them. They were reluctant, but they did it.

What came back was not dramatic in a literary sense. It was something better: a clearer picture of the homes that had formed them, the damage those homes had done, and the different thing they somehow built together.

Both my parents came from families marked by dysfunction. My paternal grandfather was a high-functioning alcoholic, which is a neat way of saying that he could appear functional while other people carried the cost. He shouted his mates at the pub after work and neglected to provide for his family, and the whole thing blew apart while my father was still in primary school.

My maternal grandfather’s vice was gambling. He was hardworking, self-contained, and endlessly drawn to the track: the trots on Friday night, Randwick on Saturday, Canterbury during the week. He liked to think of himself as a smart gambler, but when he lost, he lost badly. It was ugly. The marriage survived, though only just. There were affairs. At one point he left my grandmother and told her to stay away. She refused, and somehow they carved out a future.

This was the inheritance on both sides: instability, disappointment, the lingering stench of male self-absorption.

And yet the thing my parents gave us was respect.

My mother, in the life story she finally wrote, put it plainly: she and my father “always had respect for one another. That’s something, you know—respect. It carries you through the bits love can’t always smooth over. I saw early on that he was steady, a good man. And I think he saw in me someone who wouldn’t flinch when life got hard. Between us, we managed.”

That was the gift.

Not glamour. Not ease. Respect. A way of speaking to one another, trusting one another, making room for one another. A pattern of mutual regard sturdy enough to survive real life.

My parents are both still alive. My mother is ninety-one and lives in a nursing home with dementia. My father is ninety-six. Every day he goes to see her and stays for four hours.

There are more dramatic ways to prove devotion, but four hours a day is its own kind of eloquence. It is the old vow translated into the plain prose of age. It is respect after youth, after ease, after memory has begun to fray.

That was the foundation they laid. Not just that they taught us respect, but that they lived it. And are still living it now.