I once had an uncle who was a very hard-working truck driver, taking extra runs to support his family. He went away for days at a time and returned home to a wife and four daughters whose lives were interrupted by his returns. He slept when he was at home and the wife and children had to keep quiet, couldn’t play in the house, couldn’t watch television—because the television was in the room next to his bedroom. When he was gone, they made their own lives without their father, going to school, enjoying social activities with their friends, and so on. My aunt never worked, so she involved herself in her daughters’ lives, kept house, and watched TV.

My uncle had a very domineering personality and a mercurial temperament, which he’d inherited from his own father, and he’d married a woman very much like his own mother. Some women are attracted to domineering men. There is a kind of female sexuality that is drawn to such men, like moths drawn to flames. But it goes beyond sexuality; there is a symbiosis there, strange as it may appear to an outsider, on which both the moth and the flame depend for their sense of identity and psychic security.

The flame warms and illumines, identifying and locating all in its light, thus giving them their names and places. They circle about the flame, knowing themselves by their relationship to it. Their dependence on the flame is apparent—to the flame, to themselves, and to any outsider who may observe. What is not so obvious are the times when the flame may grow weary, and when it does, the moths become anxious, circle the flame and fan it back to brightness, often against its own will to burn.  Thus, the dependence of the flame on the moths is every bit as great as their own dependence, though it’s apparent to no one (except perhaps an outsider).  Said my uncle on one occasion when he and his wife were resuming their symbiosis (“marriage”) after a troubling break, “I never notice when she’s here—but I notice when she’s not.” He believed that was love, just as she believed her irresistible attraction to him was love. The pattern repeated itself, resulting in occasional minor violence—mostly shouting or throwing things—through separations, even through divorce and remarriage, and then divorce again.

When my uncle was roused from sleep, he’d throw the clock across the room, bellow at his wife for waking him, scaring everybody, and (though she’d never admit it) titillating her. I watched my aunt in fascination. Everything about my uncle was open, visible, nothing hidden. With my aunt—not so. Sipping a glass of tea at the kitchen table, talking quietly as her husband slept, my aunt sometimes revealed depths of resentment that passed anger and arrived at hatred. As a child, I didn’t like my uncle, but I wasn’t afraid of him. I didn’t like my aunt either, but she scared me half to death.

Eventually, they entered a final divorce. My aunt married a stable, dependable man who owned a restaurant and gave her the financial security she craved. My uncle “took up with” a woman who was independent, having worked all her life, and she took no hollering nonsense from him. I think both my aunt and my uncle were, each of them, a little in awe of their respective second mates. My uncle was amazed, and then grateful, that he did not frighten his lady friend and ultimately came to discover that her lack of submissive fear did not diminish his manhood. My aunt was simply dependent, financially and emotionally, on her new husband, though she continued to blame my uncle for any unhappiness she suffered. And she taught her daughters to do the same.

Tragically, my uncle’s daughters abandoned him after the divorce. He could have lived with the loss of his marriage, but the loss of his children’s love broke his heart.

I went to see him a year or so before he died. The “flame” had gone out of him. There was a grief that had never really left him, but his acceptance of it had given him a kind of peace. I liked him, and I pitied him from my heart. He died of cancer, in pain and suffering, and in the arms of his lady friend, very much like the child he really was.

My aunt lived a long life after the death of her second husband, in the security of the house he had provided for her, and in the security of her attendant daughters, who became increasingly resentful of that dependence, and so, eventually, in the nursing home where they placed her. I went to visit her a few months before her death. She spoke of my uncle as though she had forgiven him, crediting the long survival of his relationship with his lady friend to the lady’s ability to “stand up to him,” without acknowledging any love that might have been between them. Actually, I think she understood love as a language of power, and that had been the cause of all her sorrow.

I have wondered how well either of them ever understood themselves, each other—or the passion they called love. Watching them as a child, I learned that the light and dark sides of our hearts are not always what they seem. We know how a flame can destroy a moth but not so much about how a moth may destroy a flame, and yet I know well that it did: I never knew my four cousins very well, only by sight and name. I met them again after a separation of many years when they drove down here to rural Georgia for my uncle’s funeral. After the brief service, they descended on the little place in the woods where my uncle had lived his last years, looking for the valuable assets they believed he’d hidden from them. I sat in the Waffle House with my uncle’s lady, drinking coffee and watching as they took off on the back roads for his primitive little dwelling. My uncle’s lady wept into a paper napkin, “I’m so grateful he’s not here to see this.” They weren’t gone long. Disappointed, angry, and confused, they’d found nothing, and so they got back into big, expensive cars and drove back to Atlanta, empty-handed.