Out Of The Old Black Bag
OUT OF THE OLD BLACK BAG
Return to Camelot — Part 2
As the family members were dispersing, I dwelt on the legacy into which I had been adopted 40 years hence, and, even more so, to the interview of the American press with First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy following JFK’s untimely assassination in 1963. It was “Jackie” who first attached the term “Camelot” to the two years of the Kennedy presidency with its grandeur, glamor, and unrivaled idealism. That short epoch in time embodied qualities reminiscent of the romanticized Camelot of Arthur, Guinevere, and Lancelot: youth, fashion, charisma, legendary bravery. This sentiment of Jackie helped to dispel the national stigma surrounding the tragedies that beset America’s first family: the curse of the Kennedy’s.
I think that every human life is fraught with unforeseen danger and that all families have their intrinsic “curse,” whether it be destruction by their own or by outside hands, genetic maladies caused simply by “losing the coin toss” at conception, fame or fortune that is unable to be reconciled, or even spiritual desertion or unavoidable loneliness. A genetic neurological disorder affected 50 percent of the 12 children who survived childhood in the well-to-do Bonacci family and had repercussions for the families of all 12 offspring. How crucial and sustaining it is to cherish those memories created in those times of happiness and freedom from want and anxiety that seem so rare — rather than at the reunion surrounding a funeral.
Historians have spilt much ink comparing the Kennedy’s to another American family immersed in fame and grief — the Hemingway’s. “We were, sort of, the other American family that had this horrible curse!” admitted Oscar-nominated actress Mariel Hemingway, the granddaughter of iconic author Ernest Hemingway. The curse involved multigenerational mental illness and substance abuse, primarily alcoholism.
As a diffident, anxious collegiate, I had great reverence for Ernest Hemingway as an author and championed the theme that served as the underpinning of his celebrated fiction: Courage is grace under pressure. I wrote a thesis glorifying his huge body of work. I got an “A.” (Too bad I managed only a “C’ in physical chemistry.)
In recent years, historical treatises (like the Ken Burns documentary series) have shed light on the brilliant author’s troubled life: the chaotic upbringing, his narcissistic personality, the four troubled marriages, his physician-father’s violent suicide, his lifelong battle with depression culminating in his taking of his own life with the shot of a handgun to the head at the age of only 61. Hemingway’s untimely demise occurred shorty after he won the Nobel Prize for one of his most-cherished stories, “The Old Man and the Sea.” In retrospect, there were repeated foreshadowings of “Papa” Hemingway’s preoccupation with violent death in his fiction; it was reported that he once told star actress and friend Ava Gardner, “I spend a hell of a lot of time killing animals and fish so I won’t kill myself.”
WHY, Hemingway? Like most things in medicine, it was multifactorial!
Ironically, Hemingway would later refer to the father who taught him how to hunt and fish, and who shielded him in part from the recriminations of his overbearing mother, as a “coward.” He would not be alive to comment in later years when his youngest sibling and only brother Leicester (also a writer) died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, nor when his sister Ursula died by intentional drug overdose — as did Margaux Hemingway, the daughter of his oldest son Jack (fondly nicknamed “Bumby”). Of the 8 members of Ernest’s nuclear family, 4 succumbed to suicide. Although not a genetic disorder with a Mendelian mode of autosomal dominant inheritance (like Huntington’s Disease, the curse of the Bonacci family), suicide behaved like one in this relationship.
It is believed that a distant ancestor of the Bonacci family, Fibonacci (“son of Bonacci”), founder of the Fibonacci sequence, was considered to be “the most talented Western mathematician of the Middle Ages.” Both granddaughters of Ernest, Margaux and Mariel, were talented and famous actresses. After her sister’s suicide, Mariel became a public spokeswoman for the ravages fraught by mental health disorders:
“I think we live in a world where creativity is defined by how much pain you go through, and that’s a misinterpretation of artistry… I think if my grandfather were around today, he would go, ‘Wow, I didn’t have to suffer.’”
To be continued…
source http://www.thepediablog.com/2022/09/21/out-of-the-old-black-bag-30/
Comments
Post a Comment