Wednesday, March 22, 2017

So Sad

This is rare non-beer post.  I just read the New York Times' obituary of former major league manager Dallas Green, who managed the 1980 Philadelphia Phillies to a World Series title.  These two paragraphs are heartbreaking:
In his later years, Green struggled to recover after the shooting death of his 9-year-old granddaughter, Christina-Taylor Green, who was one of six people killed in the failed assassination attempt on Representative Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson in 2011.

Two years later, on the release of his autobiography, “The Mouth That Roared,” he conceded that he was still dealing with the death. “They say time heals,” he said. “Time, I don’t think, will ever heal that part of my life.”
It reminded my of a passage in William Maxwell's haunting autobiographical novel So Long, See You Tomorrow, where years after his mother's death when he was ten, he realized he had not gotten over it. 
I meant to say to the fatherly man who was not my father, the elderly Viennese, another exile, with thick glasses and a Germanic accent, I meant to say I couldn't bear it, but what came out of my mouth was "I can't bear it."  This statement was followed by a flood of tears such as I hadn't ever known before, not even in my childhood.  I got up from the leather couch and, I somehow knew, with his permission left his office and the building and walked down Sixth Avenue to my office.  New York City is a place where one can weep on the sidewalk in perfect privacy.
Other children could have borne it, have borne it.  My older brother did, somehow.  I couldn't.
Godspeed Dallas Green.

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