My Grandpa Russell

My grandfather Russell, born in 1914 in Cambridge IL, was the oldest of seven siblings.  But growing up near him, the only relative of his that I ever met were a great uncle of his, and a distant cousin.  I never met Russell's parents or any of his many siblings or their families.  In fact Russell never told me his siblings' names, and he told contradictory stories of how many there were and where he fell in the birth order.  He said he wanted to forget about them and never see them.  He left home at age 16 and never went back.

While my grandpa was alive, he DID tell me that his father, Charlie, was a crook and a jailbird who had stolen money from Russell after he had left home.  Russell hated his father.

Four years after Russell died, my brother and I located his surviving siblings: three sisters, and the widows of his two brothers.  They live not far from where they were born.  They were all very sweet people who had wondered about their older brother and hoped to see him again sometime.  They said that Russell's mother Rena had looked for him rather seriously over the years.

My newly-found great aunts told me that  Charlie was an alcoholic who left their family around the time that Russell also left.  They believed that Russell and Charlie were living together happily, and even though they are now in their 80s-90s  they still feel unloved and rejected by both Charlie and Russell.  They were surprised to hear that Russell did not like his father, and never lived with him happily.

My great aunts also told me that shortly after Charlie left his family, he returned and burned down the family house for the insurance money.  Some of the children were in the house at the time.  Everyone survived, but just barely.  After that  the family was destitute and several times were split up among different households while Rena tried to care for them all.

Social Security death records tell me that Charlie died in Florida when I was a teenager.    Rena is dead now too.

The puzzle for me is: why did Russell reject his siblings?  Was he embarrassed to see them?  Did he feel guilty that he escaped?  Was he snobby?  Did he think he was better than they?  I am so sorry that they still hurt after all these years.  Clearly there was some kind of pain there, and I am trying to understand it.

There are people in my life, close friends from the past, who I never see any more.  Sometimes they ask my mother about me, or ask her to have me call them.  But I never contact them.  It seems like too much.  Like big overwhelming  too-muchness.

Once I had a boyfriend who left town.  He wrote me all the time.  Big pleading letters to write him back.  Sometimes I talked to him on the phone if he called, but I never wrote him a single letter.  It seemed like too much.

Is this like my Grandpa?  Is it a form of rejection?  Did my grandpa feel like it was all just too much?   If feels like a kind of repression done to avoid an overwhelming emotional feeling--even though the feeling would likely be positive.  I don't know.