He is not a close friend of my parents. However, his personal and professional circles intersect with those of my parents and the adults whom I was around when I was growing up. I knew those people to be decent, honest, conscientious people who cared about right and wrong.
My parents had a lot of trauma at a time when there wasn't a lot of support for their type of trauma. A parent of each of them committed suicide. Suicide is something that people didn't often talk about 40 years ago, when my mother's father died, and it was talked about even less 60 years ago, when my father's mother died. My parents were also isolated in rural Vermont during the years when the trauma of my grandfather's death was most acute, trying to continue to take care of their family in the midst of their pain. They had chosen to live out there at the beginning of their marriage, never thinking that grief would hit them the same way twice. There was no Internet then, which could have helped them to be less alone.
Sometimes, stress in families is so bad that there are permanent ruptures of relationships; that's what happened to my relationship with my parents. It doesn't mean that Bernie Sanders wouldn't be a good President.
Copyright L. Kochman, January 12, 2016 @ 6:44 a.m.
