My Name was Supposed to be Elizabeth Ann

Approximately two weeks after my mother-in-law was granny-napped and installed at her oldest daughter’s family-owned care home, her daughters arranged to escort their mother to her bank and lawyer’s office. Her son (their brother and my husband), who at the time was her POA and property caretaker, had been seen on numerous occasions stealing furniture and other belongings from the house, some of which he had burned in the side yard. There were allegations of a more serious nature, as well, including mail theft, mismanagement of funds, and elder abuse, and they intended to stop it, first by accessing their mother’s accounts and then by revoking the original POA and installing one of them in his place.

While traveling to their arranged meeting place, however, the middle daughter was hospitalized with appendicitis, which required the oldest one to follow through with their plans. Whether they had overestimated their powers of persuasion or underestimated their mother Millie’s (not her real name) stubbornness and distrust, the daughters were only partially successful. Millie insisted on meeting her representatives alone and, because she could at times sound perfectly fine and reasonable while conversing, her representatives agreed. The original POA was revoked, but a replacement was neither created nor approved and oversight of her accounts and home remained in limbo.

Afterwards, they drove to a neighbor with whom my mother-in-law had routinely entrusted her keys, the other set six hours away in my husband’s care. Millie wanted to see for herself the damage he had wrought, inventory the things he had stolen. 

Upon entering, however, both were aghast, dumbfounded by what they saw within. Oldest daughter tracked her mother’s meanderings as she looped through the house repeating, He didn’t touch nothing. He didn’t touch nothing.

The house was exactly as Mother left it, she told my husband later. As if she’d just gotten up and left it, intending to return.

He’d never stolen or mismanaged anything. Exactly as he had told them.

Many of us can be convinced lies are truth and act accordingly, spreading falsehoods and, sometimes, adding new ones to the mix. Even when all the evidence, all the facts, contradict those beliefs, we struggle and often fail to change our minds.

Why?

While Julius Caesar is based on historical events and, according to Frank Kermode, relies heavily on Plutarch’s Lives of Brutus, Caesar, and Antony, it is not a documentary. Rather, Shakespeare’s method in this and his other histories is “the double one of dramatizing an extensive historical narrative and achieving a sharper focus on the relevant political issues and personalities.”¹ In other words, the playwright’s invention functions as a lens through which to investigate Elizabethan concerns and also, I would argue, contemporary ones.

That’s what I have always LOVED about literature, how a well-crafted story not only transports us to other times and places but allows us to live within them. Reading entertains, yes, but more importantly it enables us to experience others’ struggles vicariously and, having done so, more clearly understand our own lives and our shared world. 

So what can Brutus teach us?

In last month’s post, I suggested oldest sister’s argument with her hairdresser shared similarities with Brutus’ Act II, Scene 1 soliloquy wherein he justifies assassinating Caesar. I asked why he is convinced murder is his best–his only–option when he is reputed to be an honorable, noble man. As Act 1 reveals, part of the answer lies within his nature: He “[loves] the name of honor more than [he fears] death.” Part of it lies within his judgments: He erroneously ascribes to Cassius a similar motivation and thereby sets himself up to be manipulated by him. Cassius recognizes that Brutus’ “honorable mettle may be wrought from that it is disposed” and confesses in his own soliloquy that he has forged testimonials supporting Brutus over Caesar and will, obscured by nightfall and a portentous storm, throw them through Brutus’ windows. “For who so firm that cannot be seduced,” he muses.

Turns out, many of us are like Brutus, susceptible to those like Cassius.

No, I am not arguing we’re all capable of murder, nor that arguing with one’s hairdresser about politics is the equivalent of plotting an assassination.

Rather, I’m suggesting many of us can be convinced lies are truth and act accordingly, spreading falsehoods and, sometimes, adding new ones to the mix. Even when all the evidence, all the facts, contradict those beliefs, we struggle and often fail to change our minds. Millie’s daughters made just such mistakes in judgment when they believed, spread, and acted upon lies about their brother.

Why?

As part of the Apple News in Conversation podcast series Think Again, host Shumita Basu discussed those tendencies with author Malcolm Gladwell. According to Gladwell, we receive new information and experiences through the filter of what we know (or think we know) to be true. Revising those initial impressions can be difficult if not impossible for some of us, not only because as individuals we hate to look stupid, but because there is such an intense public stigma attached to being wrong. Particularly, he argues, in the political spectrum, wherein those who change their minds are labeled hypocrites or worse, their careers and reputations jeopardized.

Changing our minds becomes even more difficult when we only accept information that agrees with our viewpoints and reject that which does not. This confirmation bias creates a kind of idea echo chamber that amplifies extreme voices and claims, then worsens the divide between dissenting viewpoints.

In “That’s What You Think”² Elizabeth Kolbert comments on that phenomenon, citing The Knowledge Illusion by cognitive scientists Steven Sloman and Philip Ferbach. “‘People,’” they say, “‘believe that they know way more than they actually do. What allows us to persist in this belief is other people….’ Where it gets us into trouble…is in the political domain. It’s one thing [for us] to flush a toilet without knowing how it operates, and another…to favor (or oppose) an immigration ban without knowing what [we’re] talking about.” Kolbert suggests further insight can be found in Denying to the Grave by psychiatrist Jack Gorman and public-health specialist Sara Gorman, his daughter, which “[cites]  research suggesting that people experience genuine pleasure–a rush of dopamine–when processing information that supports their beliefs. ‘It feels good to “stick to our guns” even if we are wrong.’”

Does that mean there’s no hope for us? No way to bridge our differences? 

Whereas Kolbert’s article ends on a pessimistic note, Gladwell’s interview offers strategies to develop an intentional open-mindedness, starting by recognizing that people and circumstances change, that our collective knowledge evolves. 

Think about it this way: 

If our personalities remained fixed, we would be the same at age fifty as we were at age five. If our knowledge remained fixed, we would still recommend smoking to stay thin and whiskey to soothe an infant’s painful teething, common practices in my childhood. We wouldn’t have developed rocket ships or cell phones, electric cars or life-saving gene therapies.

Opinions can and should also adapt accordingly, especially when we’re trying to address shared problems. Once, humans believed the sun revolved around Earth, that disease was caused by demons and witches, that women  lacked the requisite intelligence to vote, that slavery was a just and necessary institution. 

Now we reject our forebears’ ignorance. Now we recognize the absurdity of such arguments. 

Now, can we please do that for ourselves?

As a novice teacher in 1991, I planned each lesson to the minute. I even wrote scripts, anticipating each and every question my students could possibly ask. I told you, remember, I DID NOT want to fail. I DID NOT want to look stupid.

LOL, as my former sophomores’ sophomores would now say. 

That model lasted a mere few days. Not because it was too much work, but because it didn’t work. 

It didn’t allow for the fact that we all had different learning styles.

We all brought unique backgrounds to the classroom. Unique perspectives and needs. 

Instead of fighting that awareness, I embraced it. 

I embraced them, and in so doing became a better teacher and human being than I could have otherwise done. I am forever grateful for their lessons. Forever grateful for their insights.

If only Millie’s daughters had done the same with their brother, I’d be writing a different story. 

*****

In March 2020, no one expected my mother-in-law to survive.

Nights, we visited her in the hospital. Days, my husband called his oldest sister to update her on their mother’s progress, and she updated the middle sister in turn.

They were good conversations. Open, honest. Sincere. While their relationship had never been easy, he wondered–hoped, perhaps–whether this time things might be different. Maybe this time, they could get it right. 

They didn’t. 

I may live to regret it, oldest sister told him. But if I have to pick, I’m going to pick [middle sister].

Mid-April, Millie was discharged and came to live in our home. By June, her mobility had improved, as had her swallowing, and even the rotation of in-home nursing had ended. She insisted she’d made a full recovery and had been clamoring to return home, six rural hours away. However, the damage to her vision and cognition was permanent and would most likely worsen over time, rather than improve. 

We had told her–the doctors and nurses had told her–that she might be cleared at some point for a supervised visit, but she would not be able to live independently. 

Nonetheless, she had talked herself into a miracle and was furious when none was forthcoming. 

Furious with me. Furious with my husband. 

TBIs can wreak terrible havoc with one’s personality and judgment. Hers certainly did so.

Later, we learned she’d been telling the most god-awful lies about us to anyone who would listen, anyone who might take her back home. 

Later, we learned she had told similar lies about the oldest daughter and her husband. 

In a letter the middle daughter wrote to Millie while in the care home, she cautioned her mother against those lies, not because they were lies BUT because saying the same thing about oldest daughter that she’d said about son wouldn’t look good if they ended up in court. 

We found that letter among Millie’s things after she passed, along with several opened pieces of our mail which the post office had erroneously forwarded to the care home. Instead of returning them to us unopened, the care home had given them to Millie. 

Middle sister was right about one thing. Ultimately, yes, they did head to court, as my husband needed to clean up the mess the three women had wrought. He’d made a promise to his father, you see, before his father passed. 

He promised to take care of his mother.

No matter what.

*****

In Julius Caesar, Brutus’ struggle evokes a sense of inevitability. Things don’t have to happen this way and yet they do–because Brutus adjusts neither his thinking nor his actions when confronted by evidence of his mistakes.  That, I believe, is his real tragic flaw.

The same is true of this story. This story was never going to end happily. 

For every lie told about my husband (and me) there is either no evidence to support it or plenty of evidence to refute it, including letters and texts written by Millie’s daughters themselves. That’s why the Orphan’s Court judge ruled in my husband’s favor, restoring the documents his mother established years before her fall. 

That, and Millie herself. 

When deposed by her court-ordered attorney, she could not recall the August meeting with her former lawyer. She could not recall revoking her POA,  nor of removing her son as her caretaker. In fact, she said, she would never do that.

It’s clear, my husband was told after the ruling. You’re the only one of her three children that she trusts. The neighbor to whom she’d given her keys? She’d also given him a note instructing him to allow no one into her house except herself…

And her son.

He has that note in his files.

And yet….

Millie’s daughters wanted to believe the worst of him because doing so made them look better by comparison. Doing so made them the victims in the family drama, not the villains.  That’s why their lies continued. After the ruling. After her passing. It didn’t have to be that way, and yet it was.

No wonder the hairdresser can’t get it right. 

No wonder we can’t get it right in our country. 

We can’t even get it right in our families.

And that’s the real tragedy.

*****

1. “Julius Caesar” by Frank Kermode, pp. 1100-1104, The Riverside Shakespeare (1974).
2. “That’s What You Think” by Elizabeth Kolbert, pp. 66–71, The New Yorker (February 27, 2017).

*****

I usually post the first Saturday of each month.

Next up, July 1st: THE WORLD’S GREATEST LIE, On 5-Year Letters and Paolo Coehlo’s The Alchemist

And coming August 5: Original flash fiction inspired by May’s recent StoryADay Challenge

Thanks for reading 🙂