Senseless hate is the saddest irony of all

The Boston Herald

Beverly Beckham

She used to live with them. They took her in when no one else would. She'd been staying with her mother, but the mother, one morning, looked across the kitchen table at this pregnant daughter and her young husband and said, "Go. I don't want you here anymore. Find someplace else to live."

And so the couple packed their belongings, left the house, bought a newspaper, sat in the library and pored over the apartment-for-rent ads. They phoned a few, but got no results. They didn't have money for a down-payment; they had no collateral except themselves.

Night fell and they had no place to go. The woman phoned her sister, who lived 40 miles away. "Why didn't you call sooner," the sister said. "Where are you? Stay there. We'll come and get you."

The sister and her husband rescued the pair, brought them back to their home and turned a den into a bedroom for them. "You can stay here as long as you like," the woman said.

The young husband worked two jobs. There were nights he didn't come home, nights he slept where he could because he had only a few hours off. He worried about not being around when his wife had the baby, but the sister said, it's OK.

"We'll be with her. We'll take her to the hospital if we have to."

And that's what happened. It was the middle of the night and the brother-in-law drove while the sister held her hand.

They phoned the father and he came right away, but they were the first to see the child and it was to their house the family returned and lived for nearly a year.

A decade later, the families weren't speaking. The sisters had quarrelled. Some slight had infuriated one or the other, or a comment had been misinterpreted, or one hadn't said or done something that the other thought should have been said or done. The offense that pitted sister against sister was not grievous.

"Why aren't you two talking? What happened between you and your sister?" someone would ask and neither could come up with an answer. A sigh and a disgusted look and a "I have no use for her," always substituted for reason.

Time took that slight fissure, that undefinable hurt, and wore it into a crack. And like water that freezes on roads, this little bit of hate expanded and the crack grew bigger and bigger until it destroyed not just what was near it, not just yesterday or the month before or even tomorrow, but the very foundation upon which their relationship was built.

"This is crazy. She's your only sister," friends said. "Why don't you just make up?" But the sisters remained silent, the silence fed by something that now had a life of its own.

I remember a friend and her brother having an argument that lasted for months. Who knows what it was about. But one Christmas day, my friend actually sat in the car in front of her brother's house, while her husband and children rang the bell and delivered gifts.

What was so important, what hurt so huge that it couldn't be forgiven? My friend loved her brother and her brother loved her. So what was the something that was keeping them apart?

A man tells me he hasn't talked to his father in years.

He loves his father, the father he remembers. But the stranger in his father's body is not the man he used to be.

This father refuses to acknowledge his son, refuses to leave his small room to visit a family that has tried for years to embrace him, refuses all attempts at kindness.

Some hurt, real or imagined, grew within him and solidified into hate. All hate begins like this. A drop of anger or meanness or resentment, left alone, seeps into hidden places, makes room for more hate, then hardens and destroys.

The irony is it doesn't destroy the person who is hated.

It's the person who does the hating who suffers, who ends up shackled with a weight that grows heavier every day.