Sack Full Of Grudges

Social worker Gemma Heffernan calls them “gunnysackers,” crabby old people who make you so mad you want to, well, spit.

“Gunnysackers,” she explains, have spent a lifetime bagging up slights and hurts that come spilling out in their elder years.

“When they get older, they lose some of the social governors that younger people have,” says Heffernan, who works with elders at Leisure World-Laguna Hills. “Things come out of them unfiltered.”

Yup. They came out unfiltered from the mouth of a real grouch I’ll call “Hal.” He told me recently: “I call ‘em, like I see ‘em and that means all the G.D. words I need to use.”

Hal, 93, is alone by choice. He divorced two wives. Never supported his children and doesn’t care to see them. “All those reunions with people crying after not seeing each other for 50 years are for the birds. If you dump, you dump. That’s it. Forget it.”

We can only hope the kids Hal dumped - five of them, he says - feel the same way about the father they never knew.

What goes around, apparently, comes around.

It did for the world’s most married man. Only one of the 19 or so children of Glynn “Scotty” Wolfe showed up to claim his body when he died in Riverside in July. Wolfe, 89, made 29 till-death-do-us-part vows and was alone when he died.

So was my Uncle Carl, the family crab, who died in August in Cleveland.

Carl, 90, was so mean all his life that he drove away his wife and his son.

He lived in the same house for 50 years, and during that time he never changed the carpeting. Draperies were rotting at the windows the last time I visited him. He told my husband to make sure he had his own shelf in the medicine chest because “women take everything away from you.”

Carl sat in a worn easy chair, wearing a cardigan and heavy shirt in mid-August. Anyone who has ever been in Cleveland in August knows that hell isn’t a fire pit; it’s August by Lake Erie.

He was missing some teeth. His spine was bent. He thumbed through old photo albums - the kind where pictures have those little paper corners holding them in place - and told me how terrible his parents, my grandparents, were to him.

They made him go away to summer camp, for gosh sakes. He showed me the photos. “I hated it,” he said, pulling the misery out of his gunnysack.

They made him be an altar boy, go to college in town instead of away because it was the middle of the Depression. His mother even made him eat tapioca pudding.

Carl had a pretty full gunnysack.

But he showed his parents and everyone else. He lived his life exactly as he pleased. He never went to family gatherings. He never sent a Christmas card. He made everyone attend to him on his terms.

Once, when my mother, his sister, was visiting from New York, he pulled aside the curtain and saw she was in the driveway, and he wouldn’t answer the door. “I don’t talk to people unless they come around between 1 and 2,” he later said.

Carl carried his bitterness to the grave. He made no effort to pay for his funeral or a gravesite. He wrote a will that disinherited his only grandchild.

Aunt Virginia wanted to have him cremated, dig a hole over their mother’s grave, pour him in and plant a bush. In the end, the family did “the right thing” and gave him a little funeral.

But it wasn’t satisfying. They harbored vague feelings that Carl had somehow won.

Until Virginia told them about her last conversation with him. “Don’t ever reflect about the past,” he told her. “You may have regrets.”

Virginia looked her brother in the eye and said, “I think about the past a lot. It comforts me, because I have no regrets.”

What goes around eventually comes around. Amen.