Short version: Go to the Valley.

Dear A**--

I well remember tales of the "Giant Toad," and related epithets attaching to the stepmother, and how little sympathy was involved in relations between the two of you, or between you and your father, for that matter, during that turbulent period in our and the society's history. I have the impression as well, although I don't think I learned it from you, that your own mother died when you were twelve or thirteen. Independent as we later felt ourselves, we were still none of us quite ready at the threshold of adolescence to manage the transition solo with entire confidence, and whether it was death or divorce that deranged our domestic circumstances, I think that those of us who made the transition without an intact and at least halfway functional family behind us perhaps never contrived to set that first foot on the path entirely firmly.

However—to switch limbs abruptly—we play the hand we're dealt. I've never had a lot of sympathy with people who, unlike thee and me, piss and moan over their "dysfunctional" childhoods. One's father was a lush; one's mother was cold—get over it. Things are tough all over, and we've all got our threescore and ten to live, so don't bother me.

Except. Except:

Those aren't the same people you left behind in 1971, and you're not the same woman who left. The Giant Toad was your stepmother for perhaps sixty difficult months during which the two of you were at hammers and tongs, but since your last pissing match my own sister has become a mother and then a grandmother thrice over. In other words: A. Long. Time. People change.

I'm not suggesting that you and the GT should become best buds, or make the attempt. The few years you were obliged to share one another's company were not happy, and there's no reason to pretend otherwise now. But there's also no reason to pick up the quarrel afresh—no reason to treat her other than with a distant courtesy as you respond to the invitation to connect with, after all...

...your dying father.

Yes, he betrayed you; yes, he sided with the GT during the E** Salient of the culture wars back in 1970. But at one time as a very small person you adored him and you trusted him, and at one time, far, far back in the past he held his little girl and his eyes teared up at the sight of you. And now he has a very short time to live, and he wants to make peace with his only child, and wants to imagine that his only child is prepared to make peace with him.

I think you should. Make peace if you can, and even if this involves you in a certain amount of emotional pain; make peace as well if you have to fake it and actually feel nothing (but try, try to be convincing); make peace because the parent-child connection means something, and is etched into the very matrix of our genome; make peace because it is an act of kindness, and because kindness trumps pride and it trumps past hurts, particularly because they are so long past. Make peace because an old man needs it so very badly, and because it will help him far more than it hurts you; make peace even because, if you make yourself receptive, it may connect you with taproots of pain you've spent a lifetime trying to deny, and in establishing those pathways might end in helping you more than it hurts.

I speak as a man who has lost one parent and two step-parents; I speak as a man who has loved you. Go to the Valley.

Frequently I read your posts and think the apparent effort is out of proportion to the triviality of the subject.