Vulnerability

There are a number of blogs that I follow here on AOL, and some others that used to be on here until AOL USA decided to add banner ads to its journals. One of them is Judith Heartsong's blog on Blogger, which carried a frighteningly open and outspoken entry yesterday. Everybody has "issues" (I hate that word), but that was a painful read.

In a way (and I use that expression in the widest possible context), it reminded me of a gentleman of my acquaintance who grew up in the Germany of the 1940s. His father, an industrial chemist, was sent to hard labour, cutting peats for his involvement in the production of some of the lethal substances used in the gas chambers. A long fall down from the relative affluence of the prewar and war-years. My acquaintance built himself a life, marrying into a shipbuilding family, who had done well in the war years, and did not have a price to pay after 1945, unlike his dad. Even though the German Kriegsmarine had also inflicted untold suffering. The resentment at losing privileges lingered and festered, reflecting it onto his in-laws. When his son died in his mid-thirties, at the threshold of becoming a surgeon, my acquaintance went to pieces. He felt he could not relate to his wife in his grief, and entered into an affair with another woman. With the tacit approval of his spouse. The man, now in his 70s, is living life in top gear, running up and down stairs, maintaining some unusual hobbies and travelling the world for them. The occult features, which is something that is outside my remit. As does alternative medicine. It is a way of coping with what happened in the past, but it actually does not solve anything. He tried to speak to me about his grief, but so much has gone wrong there that there is very little I can do. I can only listen.