Vox Meditantis

Describe a family member.

Monday, 27th October 2025

Someone once said that the people we describe reveal as much about us as they do about themselves.

I’ve spent the morning thinking about Michael – not clinically, not as the eldest Bennett sibling who embodies our father’s pragmatic gene so completely it’s almost comic, but as the person he’s become now, at sixty-six, six months into retirement, trying to work out what a man does with his afternoons when they no longer require him to solve problems.

He rang yesterday evening, just as the harbour light was doing that October thing it does – turning water to hammered copper, making ordinariness briefly numinous. The conversation began where our conversations always begin: the mechanical – Linda’s mentioned the downspout needs attention, have I noticed whether Tom Callahan’s hip is improving, did I catch the forecast for midweek. My brother conducts emotional reconnaissance through infrastructure reports.

But then, unexpectedly: Do you ever feel as though you’ve been so good at one thing that you’ve forgotten how to be anything else?

The question hung there between Baltimore and New Corinth, carried along the same routes Father once supervised, and I recognised it immediately – the articulation I’d been circling in my own recent entries, only voiced by someone who’d never admit to circling anything.

The Blueprint of My Brother

Michael has always been a man of load-bearing structures. Where Susan nurtures and I witness, he calculates – stress points, tolerances, the precise angle at which weight distributes safely rather than catastrophically. He inherited Father’s steadiness so completely that watching him move through the world is like seeing Joseph’s ghost made flesh: the same deliberate gait, the same way of listening that makes people feel their concerns have been properly catalogued and will be addressed in order of priority.

When Father had his stroke in 1988 – the one that frightened us all, though he characteristically dismissed it – Michael arrived at the hospital already coordinating with physicians, his engineer’s mind parsing medical terminology into actionable information whilst Susan soothed Mother and I simply watched, the youngest one still learning what grown-up responsibility actually required. That was Michael: solving before grieving, building the scaffold that would hold the rest of us.

He married Linda in 1984, a primary school headteacher whose warmth balances his reserve in ways that remind me of our parents’ own delicate equilibrium – her gentle vivacity meeting his steadiness, Nevada charm softening Washington pragmatism. They raised two children who turned out exactly as one might predict: David, the structural engineer with Father’s precision and an unexpected dry wit; Rachel, the marketing director who inherited Mother’s adventurous spirit and rings me during moments of self-doubt, seeking the aunt who might understand ambition’s lonelier contours.

From the outside, Michael’s life looks like a blueprint executed flawlessly. Forty years in civil engineering, projects completed on schedule and under budget, a reputation for reliability that echoed Father’s own. Retirement arrived in 2024 with the usual ceremonies – plaques, speeches about integrity and dedication, colleagues praising his unshakeable competence.

And then, apparently, the afternoons.

What Competence Costs

Here’s what Michael said, his voice carrying that particular quality he gets when he’s trying to sound casual about something that matters: Linda keeps suggesting hobbies. Woodworking. Volunteering at the museum. I’ve started three books this month and can’t finish any of them. It’s not that I’m unhappy, exactly –

He didn’t complete the sentence, which is unlike him. Michael always completes sentences.

I offered what I know clinically and personally – that identity built entirely around utility struggles when utility no longer has clear channels, that retirement requires learning to value presence over productivity, that this transition takes time. All true. All insufficient.

Because what I didn’t say – what I’ve only just begun to acknowledge in these entries – is that I recognise his predicament intimately. Michael spent forty years being the person who solved problems, and now the problems have politely declined his services. I’ve spent thirty years being the person who witnesses others’ journeys whilst carefully avoiding risking my own. Different professions, same architecture: competence as shelter, expertise as excuse for not attempting the messier, more vulnerable work of simply being human without credentials.

He doesn’t know about the watercolour class I’ve signed up for – Tuesday evenings, wrong brushes, appropriate humility – or about David (different David, not his son) and the Bartók concert, or about Father Walsh’s potential transfer to Wilmington and what that might mean for my carefully protected dawn solitudes. Michael still sees me as the successful youngest sibling, Dr Bennett with the waiting list and the Victorian office and the community respect.

What would he make of the person I’ve been writing myself into these past weeks – someone slowly, terrestrially learning that the bravest thing might not be professional excellence but ordinary presence, not solving but simply staying put?

The Inheritance We Share

There’s a photograph Mother kept, taken sometime in 1972, shortly after we’d moved to New Corinth. Michael would have been thirteen, already showing signs of Father’s seriousness. In it, he’s helping Father repair something – a bicycle, perhaps, or a bit of fence – his young face concentrating with an intensity that made him look decades older. Susan’s in the background with Mother, learning whatever domestic art was on offer that afternoon. And I’m nowhere visible, likely observing from some margin, the introspective youngest already practising the watchful distance that would later become my profession.

We absorbed different lessons from the same household. Susan learned Mother’s nurturing instincts and Father’s moral seriousness, channelling both into teaching, into raising Emily and Matthew with the same steadiness she’d witnessed. Michael learned Father’s pragmatism and Mother’s adaptability, building structures that would hold, solving problems that yielded to patient engineering.

And I learned – what, exactly? Father’s capacity for quiet observation. Mother’s curiosity about inner lives. But also, perhaps, something neither of them intended: how to remain perpetually adjacent to intimacy without fully risking it, how to be useful without being truly present, how to mistake professional competence for human connection.

Michael’s question yesterday – do you ever feel as though you’ve been so good at one thing that you’ve forgotten how to be anything else? – suggests he’s arrived at a similar recognition. That the very qualities that made us successful – his engineering precision, my therapeutic attentiveness – might also be the qualities that have kept us safely removed from the messier, more vulnerable territories we’ve avoided.

Monday’s Small Courage

After we rang off, I sat at the window watching darkness settle over the harbour, thinking about what it means to describe someone. The prompt asked for a family member, and Michael arrived not because he’s the most dramatic or complicated – that distinction likely belongs to our aunt Dorothy in Reno, or cousin Danny with his casino-floor weariness – but because he’s the one asking the questions I’m finally learning to answer.

I rang him back an hour later. Told him about the watercolour class, the wrong brushes, the fifty-eight-year-old psychiatrist learning to be a beginner. About Father Walsh potentially leaving and what that might cost. About David (I didn’t elaborate which David) and allowing someone past the professional persona.

There was a long silence – Michael processing, calculating load factors for emotional risk the way he once calculated them for bridges.

Then: Linda’s been telling me I should try pottery. Says watching me be bad at something might be good for my character.

His voice carried that dry quality that surfaces at family gatherings, the wit I’d forgotten he possessed beneath all that pragmatic competence.

She’s probably right, I said.

Probably, he agreed.

We didn’t solve anything. But we sat with the not-solving together, two Bennett siblings who’d spent decades being extraordinarily good at our respective professions, acknowledging that perhaps the next chapter requires learning to be ordinarily, imperfectly human instead.

Michael at sixty-six, six months into afternoons that no longer require his engineering expertise. Catherine at fifty-eight, thirty years into witnessing others’ courage whilst carefully rationing her own. Both of us finally asking whether competence might actually be the sophisticated hiding place we’ve mistaken for achievement.

The harbour is dark now, October’s early dusk settled in completely. Tomorrow Father Walsh and I will walk – assuming he’s still here, assuming he chooses staying over the elegant escape of Wilmington. Tuesday evening I’ll attempt watercolour with inappropriate equipment and appropriate humility.

And somewhere in Baltimore, my brother might be researching pottery classes, learning what it feels like when your hands remember they were made for more than solving, when afternoons stretch open with possibility rather than closing in with purposelessness.

That’s Michael – pragmatic and dependable, yes, but also braver than I’d credited, asking the uncomfortable questions whilst I’ve been busy pretending my professional life constitutes a whole one.

Describing him tonight feels less like portraiture than confession. Because in naming what he’s facing, I’m forced to acknowledge what I’ve been avoiding – that we’re both learning, belatedly, what it means to be ordinary. Not because we’ve failed at extraordinary, but because extraordinary was never actually the point.

Father would have understood this, I think. Mother too, in her own vivacious way. They built a life of contribution without fanfare, usefulness without recognition, dignity found in daily showing up rather than spectacular achievement.

Michael and I are still learning that lesson. But at least now we’re learning it together, two engineers of different sorts – one of bridges, one of psyches – discovering that the real structural challenge isn’t building what holds others up, but allowing ourselves to rest on ordinary ground.

Catherine

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Bob Lynn | © 2025 Vox Meditantis. All rights reserved.