Audiobook: Non-Fiction
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prologue, learning September 2007. Deep breath in Betty Ann's oldest brother Francis died in a hospital in New Orleans. His liver completely pickled shortly after Hurricane Katrina ripped through the coast in 2005. The second oldest steve, a heroin addict, lives in Yuma Arizona steve recently got out of a halfway house. The only drugs he takes now are prescribed for bipolar disorder and depression. The youngest brother bob is a happy go lucky beer drinker still living in New Orleans. Betty Ann was okay for the most part, as long as she took her medications without them, she might be found in the garage lining up hundreds of empty milk cartons for tomato plants. She lived on a horse ranch and they didn't grow tomatoes. Betty Ann was my mother. I have never met any of these people exhale, mm hmm, June 1962. They drive to Canada early in the morning along the Northway leavings connected in new york with a letter, a prayer. Their plea for grace. All that they have left to try. Even after the doctors tell them it isn't their fault. They can't conceive a child. They hold on to their grief abused by an overbearing cold and deeply unhappy german mother. My father struggles against the broken youth now reflected in an impotency beyond his endurance. The years of undiagnosed depression made tolerable by beer cigarettes and sheer will now have a home where all the voices claiming him as weak are waiting to drag him down into a comforting despair almost a year and a half earlier. He had fainted on the job in Manhattan. They said it was his nerves, Telling a man in 1960 that he fainted because of his nerves. Was like hanging a sign around his neck declaring that he wasn't a man at all. Without knowing about his depression and years before the real cause of his malady would be revealed. The doctors treated him with little white, yellow and blue pills. Valium was a **** of a way to settle your nerves. After six months my mother got a dog so my father would leave the house to walk him. Major became my father's therapy dog and my mother went back to work. The stress of having to work on top of caring for him was both frustrating and frightening for her. But how she did love my father. She had married him, Herbert john Bartlett Jr this blond haired, blue eyed James Dean look like high school baseball and football star, World war two and korean war veteran general electric manager who was first in his family to graduate from college with every intention of being the good polish wife. She found so perfectly displayed in her own mother and grandmother. The ideal blend of strength and joy and warmth and heart. Mostly heart