How 3 Generations Suffered Depression Due to Expectations and Disappointment within a Family
Monday, November 25, 2019 5AM
I just awoke from a very strange dream. In the dream my aunt and uncle invited me to stay with them to finish writing my book. This may not sound very strange to people who don’t know me, but let me explain. I have an uncle, my father’s brother Jonathan Cole, but I have no relationship with him or his family and haven’t for some time now. The choice to cut ties with Uncle Jon was made in anger, but had been coming for a very long time. In the dream the whole family was gathered at the apartment of my Aunt and Uncle (not the actual apartment they live in but some fantastical apartment that doesn’t and couldn’t exist anywhere). It makes sense that I would dream of getting together at Uncle Jon’s this week, fore when I was a kid the whole family gathered at his NYC apartment for Thanksgiving for many years. It also makes sense that I dreamed of him specifically last night because yesterday was the 21st anniversary of when I shot myself… and Uncle Jon (and his family) did not come to visit me in the hospital after I survived the shooting.
One might assume, because of this dream, that I miss my Uncle… and I do, but not the man he became but rather the great man I once thought he was and I know that he could have been. This might sound ridiculous to people who know Jon as many think that he is a great man. He has been married to the same woman for close to 50 years. He has 2 fairly healthy children and 2 grandchildren. He was very successful monetarily… He is part of the 1%. He was successful in his career, being one of the longest serving Provosts of Columbia University. He has published several books and is considered such an expert on higher education that the Chinese Government hired him as a consultant and flew him to China to give advice on building the world’s largest and “best” public research university in the world. These all definitely sound like the trappings of a successful man in our society.
I mentioned that I once thought Uncle Jon was a great man… and this was true, when I was a small child before my parents divorce. I thought the world of him but not because of the societal trappings of success that he now has and had started to gather back then. My father, Stephen Cole, was a sick man in many ways. He had a very bad curvature of the spine (Scoliosis) that ultimately caused him to lose almost 70% of his lung capacity. As a child I can remember that one shoulder was always significantly higher than the other. My father made enough money to afford custom made suits in which extra padding was added to the low side shoulder to make him appear “even.” Towards the end of his life there was no hiding the effects of the Scoliosis; he looked like a hunch back. My father also suffered from crippling arthritis at times and chronic migraine syndrome for most of his adult life. Overall, he wasn’t a “well man.” On top of his physical ailments my father was very narcissistic personally and competitive in his work. All of this meant that he never played ball with my brother or me. He didn’t take us to ball games. He didn’t encourage us to pursue things that we were interested in. He encouraged us to pursue the things that he had been good at… getting good grades and making money.
When my uncle and his family would visit us out on Long Island he would play ball with me outside. I was too young to emotionally understand what I was thinking, but I elevated my Uncle to hero status because he wasn’t “sick” like my father. Uncle Jon doesn’t have scoliosis and stands over six feet tall. He is a handsome man. He was smart and well spoken… and much more soft spoken than my father, who had a tendency to be loud and aggressive in his speech (perhaps to make up for the fact that he was physically weak?). When I was a small child I can remember looking forward to seeing Uncle Jon and looking up to him so much.
When my parents separated and were getting divorced, Uncle Jon told me that if I ever needed someone to talk with or if I wanted to come visit in NYC… all I had to do was call and he gave me his number. But that turned out to be an empty promise. I reacted very negatively to my parents divorce. I was a problem angry kid prior to their divorce and only got worse through their dismantling of our family.
I remember that I tried talking to Jonathan a couple of times. He did not know how to deal with my anger; most people didn’t… and then he was gone. There were no invites to the city. There were no invites to join his family on vacation to the country, the Caribbean or Europe. He has had a house on Martha’s Vineyard for more than 20 years and never once has an invitation been offered even though he specifically said one would be. Invitations from Lena and me to come to our home in Rivertown were turned down. I expected my uncle to be present in my life and I was disappointed.
It wasn’t just me that was let down, Jonathan totally abandoned my brother; in some regards more so than me. My younger brother Walt, lived less than 20 blocks from our aunt and uncle in NYC all through high school and even closer during college… and during all of that time I don’t think Jonathan had Walt over for dinner once, other than the obligatory Thanksgiving get together. Walt went to Columbia University where Jon worked… and not one lunch or breakfast… not one cup of coffee. What kind of man does that? I expected my uncle to be there for Walt and was disappointed when he wasn’t. There’s no excuse, but it was indicative of a larger issue.
From the mid 1980’s until my father’s death last year there had been an ever deepening divide between the families of these two brothers (my father and uncle) who once were so close.
From what I have been told my father and his brother were very close all through college and graduate school. They both attended Columbia University at the same time. They both majored in sociology. They both went on to hey PhDs in sociology from Columbia studying under the same mentor, Robert K. Merton. Even at the beginning of their professional careers they remained close working together on research projects and books. “The Cole Brothers” were known as a formidable force!
Very early in his career (around 1969) my father left a tenure track position at Columbia and moved our to Long Island and started his career at The State University of New York at Stony Brook (which would later be renamed, Stony Brook University). I honestly am not sure why my father made this choice and he would come to dislike Long Island intensely later in life. He did become the youngest full professor in Stony Brook University’s history, and I believe he still hold this record to this day.
At this point the brothers were still very close… working together and visiting each other and their mother, who lived in Queens, often. When I started to write this blog post I dug through some old family albums that my mother has lent me in order for me to digitize them and found these photos from the year I was born. I have to admit that I was somewhat shocked or, perhaps more accurately… bewildered by the photo of my father holding me up to his face between him and my Aunt Joanna.
As far back as I can remember, I have always felt that my Aunt Joanna didn’t like me. I can’t put a finger on exactly when I was aware of feeling this way as my childhood before the age of 10 is fairly blocked in my memory… but I always felt that she looked down on me or didn’t approve of me for some reason unbeknownst to me, as a child. As a young adult I was keenly aware that Joanna and her children did not care for me and at the time I thought it was because I was an unapologetic outspoken conservative. My uncle and his family were fairly liberal back then and only became more liberal as time went on.
My mother claims that when I was 7 or 8 at a family get together, I called my cousin Daniel a “fag.” I don’t remember this. If I did indeed do this I must have been mimicking my father, who didn’t really have anything against homosexuals but was just an ass. It was clear from a very young age that Dan was homosexual. His parents and my grandmother Sylvia, Nana, were all in denial until he came out of the closest some time in college or shortly thereafter. Once Dan came out he was 100% accepted by everyone in the family. Perhaps my uncle’s family thought I did not approve because I was a “conservative,” but nothing could have been further from the truth. In college I was a hardcore Libertarian style conservative and I couldn’t care less about anyone’s sexuality. My mother also claims that Jonathan and Joanna did not agree with how my mother and father were dealing with me being a “difficult child.” So, according to my mother, I was a significant factor in the dividing of these once so close brothers and their families.
My father had a different point of view. My father had an expectation that Jonathan be grateful to him as my father attributed much of Jonathan’s success to himself. According to my father, Jonathan never would have finished his PhD if it had not been for my father’s help. Also, when my father left the tenure track position at Columbia University this opened that track up to Jonathan. There was very little chance that both brothers would have received tenured professorships at the same university. So from my father’s point of view all of Jonathan’s success at Columbia was to some extent because of my father’s actions. Jonathan couldn’t write a book on his own until he was in his 60’s. His last two books on higher education had little to no input from my father; and quite honestly… I have not read the latest book, but “The Great American University” is a steaming pile of shit, in my opinion. Regardless, my father felt (had the expectation that) Jonathan owed him a debt of gratitude that was never paid.
My father being the emotionally stunted individual he was allowed this disappointment to grow into resentment and this furthered the divide between the brothers and their families.
My father also had a very close relationship to his mother, my Nana. He would go into his office and call her for an hour every day. Nana came to visit us on Long Island often. We went to visit with her often at her apartment in Queens. I am named after my father’s father who died when my dad was only 19. Due to me being named after the love of her life and me being the first born grandchild, I was my Nana’s favorite… not that she didn’t totally dote on the other grand children, but we had a special relationship above and beyond what she had with the 3 other grandchildren. Eventually, my father and I both felt disappointed in how his brother and his family treated Nana. Nana had the expectation to be allowed to be present and appreciated in my uncle’s family. By the end of her life Nana too felt very disappointed by the behavior towards her by my Uncle Jonathan and his children.
Despite routine efforts on the part of my Nana to be part of lives of Daniel and Susanna, my uncle’s children/my cousins, she was routinely rebuffed and eventually almost totally excluded. Nana had the expectation that because she was their grandmother and that because she loved them, that they would love her back and want to include her in their lives. This expectations and resulting disappointment had the effect of causing my Nana severe emotional pain and depression. The older Daniel and Susanna got the less Nana heard from them or saw them. She was even excluded from Susanna’s wedding which took place right in NYC while she lived half an hour away in Queens. Multiplying the hurt was the knowledge that the grandchildrens’ other grandmother, Joan Lewis, was included in everything.
I can’t find the words to express how hurt my Nana was by the exclusion she felt coming from her own son’s family. She spoke to me about it often. She cried about this often. She would send the kids gifts and not even get a thank you. She wasn’t the only one treated this way. Neither my brother or I were invited to our cousins’ weddings. My aunt and uncle did have a get together at their apartment several months after Daniel and Nick got married and I was invited to that. I took a lot of very nice pictures of the party and offered them to Daniel and Nick as a kind of wedding gift. I did not get so much as a thank you email or call or anything. Furthermore, and perhaps more insulting… they never even looked at the photos. I put the photos in a password protected gallery on my website and I get notified when someone signs in… they never even signed in to look at the pictures. I tried repeatedly to connect with both of my cousins and was rebuffed every single time.
This blog post has gone on much longer than I had anticipated… The good news is that I have learned my lesson… I no longer have expectations of anyone because I realize that expectations almost always lead to disappointment… and with enough repeated disappointment leads to depression. When I married Lena in 2011 I told her point blank that we should not have expectations of one another. I said that the only expectation I had of her and she should have of me is that we not cheat on one another and that we don’t leave the relationship. I held up my end, she couldn’t live with just those expectations and apparently consistently felt let down by me and eventually asked for a divorce. Now I live a life where the only expectations I have are of myself. Period.
