Perspective

anthony l. KovatCh, mD

Return to Camelot

It was long overdue. Even as an in-law, or perhaps because I was an in-law whose role in the Lyons Family “dynasty” was often from the outsidelooking-in, I sensed a weakening of the glue adhering the generations together since the grand matriarch Mary Irene (a facsimile of the late Queen Elizabeth II with a rivaling sense of humor) passed away in 2018. No better time for an inaugural Lyons Family reunion than in the dog days of the summer of 2022. Aware that any reunion can morph into an awkward, contentious affair, I highly promoted the event and promised to report on it for posterity, but left the details to family members acknowledged for their skill and experience in planning such celebrations, ie, the womenfolk.

For my own selfish reasons, I was concerned that the generations comprising Mary and Jack Lyons’ grandchildren and great grandchildren would be strangers to each other as their 12 children left their own backyards in Pittsburgh seeking fortune and happiness in distant localities. I know that I was sensitized to this unintentional disintegration of family ties having witnessed it first hand with my mother’s large 13-child Italian Bonacci family, whose members moved out of the little village of Treskow in Northeastern Pennsylvania to leave the anthracite coal mines and seek the American dream elsewhere in the mid 20th century.

“You are very blessed if your children stay and raise your grandchildren in the Steel City,” I told the parents in my practice. “They will be so happy (and I will be too) that you can bring them when necessary to the pediatrician’s office. I will be green with envy!”

So those who were able to sacrifice the weekend made the trek. My grandchildren Miles and Mary who live in Virginia arrived the day before the event and turned our house on its head with excitement. Being 7 ½ and 6 years old, they competed relentlessly for their grandparents’ attention. Exhausted, I bemoaned the rhetorical questions presented in the accusatory song from “Bye, Bye, Birdie,” criticizing the parenting skills of my own children: “Why can’t they be like we were--perfect in every way? What’s the matter with kids (and parents) today?!”

Before turning in for a good night of recuperative sleep before the reunion, we watched old videos of my own four offspring at various ages “doing their thing” under our “supervision.” I was appalled as I witnessed full documentation of my ineptitude as a disciplinarian; the antics of my own children far outshadowed those of my grandchildren. I then recalled MY father’s tales to my relatives describing how my brother and I “destroyed” the old apartment we lived in before we moved to a house in the suburbs; Miles and Mary are pikers compared to their grandfather. As the old admonition goes: “The more things change, the more they remain the same.”

With this new perspective, I approached the reunion the following afternoon with great humility and apprehension about the validity of my remote memory! Furthermore, was it not this pediatrician who insisted on referring to this current generation of millennial parents as “Generation A”---awesome, amazing, awakened, aware, attached----because of their superior child-rearing skills compared to us baby boomers?

The Great Grandchildren---the offspring of Generation A---displaying varying degrees of enthusiasm for the reunion.

Somehow, I had it stuck in my aging, romanticizing mind that the reunion would be a return to a time in my life that might be referred to as “Camelot.” We remember Camelot as that mythical time and place in the 12th Century AD that featured the citadel of King Arthur and the noble Knights of the Round Table--- symbolizing an atmosphere of idyllic bravery and happiness, where goodness reigned supreme. In the context of my own family, Camelot embodied the wonder years of raising babies and innocent, frolicking little children and contentious but aspiring teenagers---all at the same time. Little did they know!

I later realized that my subconscious hidden agenda was to gain personal redemption for the years as a young professional when I was compelled by ambition and selfishness to “steal” (the term used by pediatrician/ poet William Carlos Williams) quality time from my devoted wife and young children. I believe that I vicariously experienced his personal guilt by reading his memoirs and that reversed my misguided emphasis on reputation germane to the medical profession; I implicitly trusted the wisdom of Williams because he practiced in Rutherford, NJ---across the Passaic River from where I grew up in Clifton---and he also graduated from Penn (across the Delaware River in Philly).

Although the great grandchildren reluctantly engaged each other and posed for pictures together, I was surprised that most of them gravitated to the activities of us elders; Miles was preoccupied with proving to his uncles that he was a formidable opponent in chess. Mary stole the spotlight by crushing the adults in jenga, a sport I had never even heard of. However, some of the more astute individuals reported hearing the laughter of matriarch Mary Irene among the adjacent grove of North Park trees; I suspect it was nervous laughter due to frustration on her part because, dining alfresco, there was no need for the activities she most enjoyed performing at parties: washing and drying the dishes!

As the family members were dispersing, I dwelt on the legacy into which I had been adopted 40 years hence and, even moreso, 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 Kennedys.

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

Continued on Page 18

From Page 15 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 Kennedys to another American family immersed in fame and grief—the Hemingways. “We were, sort of, the other American family that had this horrible curse!” admitted 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. His 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 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 actresses and were famous. 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.’”

Perhaps, the premonition of a premature death is not acquired solely by what one witnesses during their lifetime, especially their childhood. Perhaps, the premonition is also inherent in our DNA. Regardless of the truth, I think it is incumbent on us to be proactive in the matter rather than fatalistic, as was “Papa” Hemingway:

“The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.” ----from “A Farewell to Arms,” thought by some to be his greatest novel

It is improbable that Death thinks like the Army Corps of Engineers, whose motto is

“The Difficult We Do Immediately. The Impossible Takes a Little Longer!” However, it has occurred to me as a senior citizen that it is critical not to

procrastinate when it comes to warm, tender memory formation. It is time now for this writer to return to the inaugural Lyons Family reunion before tangential thinking takes me deeper into the darkness of the human condition.

A recent study published in the Journal of the American Medical Society (9/6/22) confirmed what practitioners already strongly suspected: there is a correlation between genetics and suicide attempts across the life span; this allows stratification of risk in order to focus more selectively on mediation. We must all be strong advocates for formal group education of mental health issues in the school systems, starting as early as the later elementary school years. Indeed, however, the prevention of psychological trauma needs to start in the cradle. Perhaps, the family reunion can be a periodic rededication to this global initiative (as well as to reversing climate change).

It all boils down to appreciating the “small change”---the simplistic everyday memories that comprise the fabric of our earthly lives. Let us fondly remember Emily’s searing monologue at the conclusion of Thorton Wilder’s sentimental, existential play “Our Town.”

Emily is waiting at the graveyard with her loving relatives expecting to join them in the afterlife; the audience is made to believe that she will soon die in childbirth (she does not) and is awakened to the fact that every tick of the clock is truly Camelot:

“But, just for a moment now we’re all together. Mama, just for a moment we’re happy. Let’s look at one another.

I can’t. I can’t go on. It goes so fast. We don’t have time to look at one another. I didn’t realize. All that was going on in life, and we never noticed. Take me back – up the hill – to my grave.

But first: Wait! One more look. Good-by, Good-by, world… Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you.

Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it? – every, every minute?”

The stage manager answers without emotion: “No. The saints and poets, maybe they do some.”

“Don’t let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief, shining moment that was known as Camelot.” —closing lines from the song “Camelot” by Lerner and Loewe

One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth forever… The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to the place where he arose…—Ecclesiastes 1:5 (King James version)

The author wishes to acknowledge Dr Ned Ketyer for his editing of the original article published in the Pediablog.