Irish family feuds are no joke

The Boston Herald

BEVERLY BECKHAM

Two Irish jokes:

What's a well-balanced Irishman? A guy with a chip on each shoulder.

What's Irish Alzheimer's? It's when you never forget everything except the grudges.

It's not nice to tell these jokes, I know. They perpetuate a stereotype and make light of a terrible disease.

But the jokes make a point. I've never met an Irish family where everyone gets along. Now some people might say that no families get along and that if they do, they're faking it. But I'd be willing to bet that those people saying these things would all be Irish.

My friend Caryn, who is not Irish, has three sisters and a brother and a ton of aunts and uncles and everyone speaks to everyone else. You don't have to sit Uncle Fred on one side of the room and Uncle Frank on the other. It's incredible. They have family get-togethers. They have family reunions. They go on vacations together and invite family members to play cards and no one says, "Who else is coming? If you ask so-and-so, count me out."

My friend MaryAnn has seven brothers and sisters. Her daughter just got married and all MaryAnn's brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles and cousins and second-cousins came to the wedding. And they all talked. They all hugged. They all posed for a family picture and they all smiled.

It was like witnessing a miracle.

"Everyone of you gets along? Everyone of you likes everyone else?" I asked her.

"Of course," she said. "We're family."

Family. I remember when I was a little kid my mother and her sister, which was the extent of our family, had an argument over something - who knows what it was. The argument swelled into a feud, then escalated into a war on Christmas day when my aunt sat in her car in front of our house while her husband rang the bell and delivered a present for me and picked up presents for his children. My mother wouldn't go out to greet her sister, and my aunt wouldn't budge from her car. It was a typical holiday, Irish style. It's a prerequisite that someone doesn't get along.

My grandmother had a sister who lived not two miles away from her, but we were never to mention that sister's name in my grandmother's presence. When my mother and I visited Aunt Sissy it was always on the sly.

"Don't tell Nana," my mother would warn me as we climbed up my grandmother's stairs. I would keep still though I was dying to tell. My grandmother and her sister had the same Irish blue eyes. They had the same soft, smooth skin and the same white hair. Why did my grandmother hate her sister so? What had Sissy done that was so bad?

"Sissy took your grandfather's side when your grandmother and grandfather had a fight," my mother explained when I was older.

"When did she do this?" I asked.

"It must have been 20 years ago," my mother said.

Twenty years ago!

My grandmother never visited her sister when she got cancer, never went to her wake or her funeral, never said good-bye. What's Irish Alzheimer's?

This is Irish Alzheimer's.

Then there's Jack. He's my friend's father. He doesn't talk to his sister who lives down the street from him. And he doesn't talk to his son who lives in the same town. Jack's granddaughter is getting married next month. People are flying all the way from California to attend. But will Jack be there? Of course not. He hasn't seen his grandchildren in years. He has missed their birthdays and confirmations and graduations. He has missed their entire childhoods. They are the casualties of this war.

There must be some happy Irish families somewhere. That's what I tell myself. But I haven't met one yet. All the Irish families I know take pride in the fact that they can tell you exactly what nasty thing you said 37 years ago that made them so angry. They can repeat it verbatim, describe what you were wearing, where you were standing, what the weather was like that day and how rotten you made them feel.

What they can't tell you is why they won't let it go, why they can't get past a word or a deed, forgive, forget and be whole again.