At two, two and a half, I remember him holding my hand and showing me the ropes and how to swing on them, how to get along in life. He never regarded me as the little sister he had to drag along. “Tom was my best friend from the first moment I can remember. It was a nightmare that was real, and I was never going to wake up from it. I thought we were like twins, even though he was two years older. We were so close, how could I not have shared his pain? I couldn’t bear it. “If something had made him so unhappy that he no longer wanted to live, why hadn’t he shared his trouble with me? I could have helped him. And then, suddenly, he wasn’t there for me. I felt it so deeply that he would be there for me, that I could always count on him. “I had a wonderfully warm feeling in my soul. I believed it because I couldn’t bear to believe otherwise. “I was almost fourteen when Tom, my absolute hero-whom I loved and worshipped-had, what I call in my head, his ‘accident.’ I was the only one who believed it was an accident. “What I meant by it was that I wanted to be independent, to separate myself from all the others and never again to care so much about another person, so I would never feel the pain I felt when Tom left me. “It’s a word I made up for myself when my teenage brother hanged himself. “‘Onliness’ is my word for what I call my philosophy of life,” Katharine Hepburn told me.
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