This is the time of year when you want to see things come together. It’s painful standing by watching people have their differences, especially when it’s within a family.

I always think about how when these situations play out with neither side wanting to budge and many times it’s gone on so long that people don’t even know what originally happened that got them where they are.

Life is not perfect and people make mistakes. To me it’s about carrying things too far. Everyone needs to get over themselves at some point.

Following is a story that I have been at least somewhat connected to for many years. With it being the Christmas Season, I thought how nice it would be to pull a rabbit out of the hat and maybe cause something to happen that would heal some very old wounds.

I’ll start out by telling you of a young man that went off to Vietnam in the early 1970s. That person was my brother Kenny. He met a fellow while in the service, that was from Wyoming. After they both got out of the Army by the mid 70s, they ended up coming to work for me. This army buddy was tagged with the nickname Catfish soon after he arrived here. (Not to be confused with my grandson that we have affectionately called Catfish. I don’t think they have ever met)

I think for this Catfish it was because he always had a mustache that he groomed in such manner that it looked like the whiskers of a big yellow-cat.

Since Kenny and Catfish were old army buddies, they stuck close together. When Kenny branched off with his own construction business by the early 1980s, Catfish went with him. Of course I would see him around throughout the years but I didn’t have many real interactions with him. Catfish stayed with Kenny throughout the years, occasionally going elsewhere for periods of time.

He married not long after landing in Texas, had a daughter and a son and then divorced. I never heard much about the circumstances of the divorce but I knew it wasn’t a happy one. Catfish was a bad drunk for many years, so I figured that played into it at least somewhat.

About 10 years ago he had been gone awhile and a lady down in the San Antonio area got a number for Kenny and called him, saying that Catfish was in poor health and the trailer park where he was living was closing and he needed to be somewhere else.

Kenny got him moved up to this area and helped him tend to his affairs. For a while Kenny moved him in on the property of an ex-wife. That arrangement worked because Catfish paid her to help see after him.

Eventually that didn’t work and he moved him in on a place next to a friend in Liberty Hill, that was happy to have him, as it brought in a few dollars rent and was a beer drinking buddy.

Then health issues caused Catfish to need to be moved to a nursing home. Kenny dutifully saw to his medical and financial needs placing him at Bertram.

Neither of his kids wanted anything to do with him and hadn’t for most of their lives. I chased down an address for the son, who coincidentally lived in far northern Burnet County. Kenny tried reaching out to the boy at some point but got nowhere and finally conceded that relationship what not to be.

Upon Kenny’s death almost a year ago, I was the only one that really had any connection to Catfish. So I assumed his medical power of attorney duties and got all the financial arrangements worked out with the Nursing Home. Dementia has pretty well taken over, to the point that Catfish doesn’t really understand who I am.

A few days ago I decided that it would be worth making one last attempt at getting the father and son together. It seemed like the thing to do. After a little digging I ran across a newspaper article about the death of the son caused by a vehicle accident back in 2022.

I’m certain that Kenny never knew about that death. That’s just how disconnected it all was.

The daughter lives a little farther away, and I always felt the estrangement was even greater with her. But I may try to make contact one day.

Maybe it really doesn’t matter, but it seems a shame for people to not have at least some family member to look in on them.