Durward and Charles – Goodbye

(continued from previous Durward and Charles episodes)

I’m a blood relative of Charles. He was my uncle, my father’s brother. But a woman who is related to him only by law—Betty, his daughter-in-law—told me my writings about Charles were distressing her and that I was, in her words,  “making fun of the mentally ill.” I never considered Charles to be mentally ill. He was a lot of things. He had an outsize personality; he was fearless; he was a doer. He was fun to be around (when he was sober—and many times when he wasn’t). He could be mean. His actions could be amoral or immoral, if not illegal. But that has nothing to do with mental health.

Charles knew right from wrong, and if he behaved wrongly, it was because he chose to do it, and he chose it because he enjoyed it. When Charles wasn’t drinking heavily, he was a successful businessman. But he had a weakness for alcohol, and he often overindulged. Alcohol was his downfall, as it is with many people. Alcohol is a drug, but drug addiction is not a mental illness.

Far from intending to make fun of him, I wrote about Charles because I considered him a once-in-a-lifetime character, the likes of which I’ll never meet again. However, if writing about him, even when I’m describing true events, brings distress to other family members, then I won’t continue doing it. It’s not worth it. After all, for me there is no gain for writing about him, and therefore no loss for not writing about him. I’ll always have Durward and Charles in my memories. As long as I live, they’ll be alive, in a sense, if only to me.