“So, I see that you are giving your little cousins room to come to terms with their parents' decisions, and they are doing better than some adults – but how do you feel about your 'grasping millionaire heir socialites who didn't know not to drink and drive with their baby in the back' parents, Colonel?”
Capt. Josiah Parker was talking with his most fascinating therapy patient: Colonel Henry Fitzhugh Lee, who was as close as anyone would ever get to talking with Robert E. Lee before he made the decisions that led to him being on the Confederate side of the Civil War. It was actually fascinating to listen to this 21st-century body double of the general in light of him consciously making every decision possible to stay off that path, like his grandfather, and like his great-grandfather, the latter counseled by the general, his great-uncle, to go in the opposite direction.
But the modern Col. Lee's father had reverted, seeking his antebellum Southern ancestors' life of blue-blooded wealth, not content with the humble power of the life of the Lees-of-the-Mountain – and it had cost him, enormously.
Hiram Fitzhugh Lee's son, heir to all his parents had grasped at, was calm in answer – gravely, sadly calm.
“I have it easier than my little cousins do,” he said. “I was only 19 months old when the car accident happened. My Lee grandparents are the only parents I have ever known, and the only parents I could ever have truly ever had. I would not exist except that my Slocum-Lofton grandfather loved his daughter and granddaughter but was determined that he should leave his estate to a male heir, while my grandmother was equally determined to leave what he would leave to her and what she would make of it to their daughter and granddaughter. My mother's first husband died in Vietnam, and my father was already sizing her and the family up and had that Lee name and vigor and virility to work with. So he won his suit, and I came along nine months later, and they were set – my grandfather would die and they would have his money until was I was 18.”
“Or, 19 months,” Capt. Parker said.
“Not even that long, because my Slocum-Lofton grandfather, presented a grandson, rallied and lived an extra six months. By the time the legalities were worked out and the official mourning was over, my parents had one month to play around with my inheritance. They were coming from a celebration, actually, when they were removed from being able to do that, forever. As the kids say today, they 'fumbled the bag.'”
“Wow,” Capt. Parker said.
“That's what I was to them,” the colonel said. “I was told later that they had shown me off at that party like a prize trophy and then plopped me down in the nursery and partied until after midnight. They thought they had arrived. My mother had overcome her father's chauvinism and my father had overcome his branch of the family choosing to drop the ball and go into all the advantages Jim Crow would have given us. But they had not arrived yet. That would happen some time around 2:00am, where they went precisely where they had prepared their souls to be. Thank God. He saved me, right there.”
“Well, that's definitely a deeply considered perspective,” Capt. Parker said.
“I have been thinking about this a great deal since my second marriage, remembering how I would have given anything, even my life and my eternity, if I could have protected my first wife and child from the death that found them. I took my time remarrying and even longer considering becoming a father again because I understand the awesome responsibility of a family, and how at any time I am commanded to lay down my life and would not find it a hardship. I love Maggie so much … and I know I will love our child so much … to live or die for their welfare shall be no hardship, and in fact, I desire that discipline in my life.
“But I did not learn that kind of love that echoes that of Christ from my parents, nor could I have … I did not learn what gives life meaning from them, nor could I have. They did not know. My father had once known, having grown up in it, but had wilfully forgotten it in pursuit of a fragment of life … an ancestral legacy of living high on the hog and playing God. I marvel that he also wilfully forgot how that ended for Col. Henry Lee of old, and all his children who survived to the end of the Civil War.”
“People want what they want,” Capt. Parker said, “and few examine their own memories any more than they do their family's history.”
“And the cost of that,” the colonel said, “is that my parents' memory does not exist, not even as a fragment of life, to the son who never really existed except as a fragment of a life they would never attain. I am the child and legacy of Horace Fitzhugh and Linda Fairlane Lee. That is all that I remember, and it is true.”
So sad but he speaks the truth.
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Yes ... I know children and adults with that story. Doing the right thing as a parent, guardian, grandparent, or teacher is really hard. Not doing the right thing, in the long run, is even harder. "The name of the wicked shall rot" -- because of Who said it, there is no exception to the rule.