I remember the cough.

A little cough. Persistent. My mother had been feeling pretty good, actually—losing weight without trying, which she took as a bonus. But this cough wouldn’t quit. It reminded me of another cough, years earlier—Thea’s cough, the one that I soon learned was caused by her cystic fibrosis. None of us connected the dots when it came to my mother’s cough. She had just turned 65 and was excited to finally qualify for medicare and social security.

Her doctor said it had been a while since they’d done a lung X-ray. The X-ray led to the biopsy. The biopsy led to the diagnosis. Stage 4B non-small cell lung cancer. Six months to live.

It was the fall of 1996. I was with her at her house in Pleasantville, a simple place where she and Bill had lived for nearly twenty years. Bill had become like a second father to me. My actual father had been missing in action since 1973.

We were sitting at the dining room table. Just the two of us. Tea getting cold. And I said what seemed like the obvious thing: “I guess we should tell Dad.”

She didn’t hesitate. Absolutely not.

I asked why.

“Because he might take some pleasure in it.”

I don’t think I’ve ever heard a sentence that rearranged me so completely. I wasn’t angry. I wasn’t even surprised, exactly. I was thunderstruck at her truth. At the depth of it. Twenty-three years after the divorce and this was what remained—not indifference, not even hatred, but the bone-deep certainty that the man she’d given six children would find satisfaction in her dying.

We never know what other people carry. That moment at her table was like a glimpse into deep space. A void where I’d imagined some residue of love might still persist. That maybe time had softened things. But no.

• • •

Six months later, mid-January 1997. Her funeral mass at St. Patrick’s—the same church where I’d taken my first holy communion, where I’d served as an altar boy, where my brother would later be married, where his two daughters would one day be baptized. The whole arc of a family’s sacraments in one building.

My father attended. He was a peripheral figure, standing off to the side. The towering, scary man of my childhood now looked shrunken and frail. Whatever power he’d held over all of us had left his body.

After the burial at Middle Patent Cemetery, I walked over to him. Put my right arm around his shoulder and leaned in. Choked with emotion, barely holding it together, I said the thing I needed him to hear.

“She loved us all.”

I wanted to share with him the same fantasy my mother had shattered at that dining room table. I wanted it to be true badly enough to say it out loud.

He gave me a quick, sad look. Said nothing. We parted.

That was the last time I ever saw him in person.

• • •

Twenty-five years passed.

He died in Florida in June of 2022, at ninety-four. Only his second wife still in his life. None of his six children had been down much, if ever. She arranged for his body to be flown up to New York. One of my sisters was going to have him buried without any ceremony—just put him in the ground. But my youngest sister intervened and organized a full funeral mass at St. Patrick’s.

The invitations went out. Jacques, 3,000 miles away in California, didn’t come. He said it was too painful, though he’d made the trip to Florida a year or two earlier to sit with our father. I think he cared more about the man than the rest of us, in his own complicated way. ZaZa didn’t come because Charlie would be there, and she was estranged from Charlie over his daughters. My stepbrother Bob didn’t attend either.

So there I was. In the same church. At the same pulpit where priests had baptized us, confirmed us, married us. Delivering a eulogy for a man I hadn’t laid eyes on in a quarter century.

I’d told Jacques years before that I didn’t think I could attend my father’s funeral. That what he’d done to me was too much. I never dreamed the roles would reverse—that Jacques would be the one who stayed away, and I’d be the one standing at the microphone.

Charlie had helped me with the eulogy. He read my early drafts and told me they read like I had a chip on my shoulder. He was right. So I scrubbed it clean. Made it about the people in the pews, not the man in the box. I listed every one of the twenty living descendants by name. I gave my father the church, the faith, the horses and dogs, the wicked sense of humor. I closed with John Prine.

So if you’re walking down the street sometime and spot some hollow ancient eyes, please don’t just pass ‘em by and stare, as if you didn’t care. Say hello in there. Hello.

“So Dad—hello in there. And now, sadly, it’s time to say goodbye.”

Standing up there felt like I’d become the priest he always wanted me to be. It also felt like an out-of-body experience. I couldn’t connect the box in front of the altar with the man who’d blocked my dreams, slapped my mother against the washing machine, demanded control over every breath his children took. It was just a box.

• • •

Afterwards, the reception. Thirty or forty people. And this is the part that stays with me.

Nobody talked about my father.

Not one story. Not one memory. Not a single “remember when he...” It was a garden party. People catching up, making small talk, refreshments on a table. The man who’d loomed so large in all of our lives—who’d controlled everything, demanded everything, withheld everything—had become a void. An atomic crater that everyone walked around the edges of, careful not to look in.

I stood there holding a drink I wasn’t tasting, watching these people who’d come out of duty or curiosity or family obligation, and I felt the full weight of what a life adds up to when you choose control over connection. When you freeze the people who love you until they stop trying.

The last time I saw any of my siblings in person was that day. Four years ago.

• • •

Over the next three years I managed to write the first book of a planned memoir trilogy. It covers two months in the summer of 1973—the summer I hitchhiked across America at twenty-one. My father appears in the first chapter. Three pages in, there’s a scene where I witness him slapping my mother across the face. It’s brief. It’s factual. It’s what happened.

During the initial development, I reached out to my youngest brother and sister to ask if they’d be willing to share their memories. They both said no. My brother was especially adamant. The past is the past, he said. He’s focused on the future. My other brother asked that he not appear in anything I write.

I honored every request. The siblings barely appear. The youngest two weren’t even born yet in 1973. One brother is three years old in footie pajamas. I changed nothing, invented nothing, dramatized nothing.

It didn’t matter. I think if any of them even bothered to read it, they put the book down on page three.

Not because I named them. Not because I exposed their secrets. But because I broke the silence contract. Every family built on repression has one. You don’t talk about what happened behind closed doors. You don’t acknowledge what you saw. You move forward and you never, ever look back.

I looked back.

My mother told me not to tell my father about her cancer because he might take pleasure in it. That’s not bitterness talking. That’s a woman who understood exactly what twenty years of marriage to that man had cost her, and she was right enough about it to say it out loud while dying.

My brother medicates the same wound with opiates. My sisters married their way out or built careers sturdy enough to wall it off. I wrote it down.

Six kids, six survival strategies. None of us wrong. All of us damaged. And the man at the center of it—the one nobody talked about at his own reception—he died the way he lived. Surrounded by silence.

So why write this? Why share it?

Because of Paul Clement Czaja. My grade school teacher—my guru, really—who taught a room full of kids to close their eyes, go inside, and meditate. Then he’d pass around a tray of photographs. Choose one, he said. A frozen moment. Inhabit it. Go with the feelings. Pour your swollen heart into explaining what you see.

Our creative magazine was called Caedmon, after the first British poet. A seventh-century cowherd who couldn’t sing, until one night he dreamed a voice that told him to. And he did.

This is what I’m supposed to be doing. I know that now. My father wanted me to be a priest—to go beneath the surface, find out what it all meant. He was right about the calling. Just wrong about the collar.

Writing has become my priesthood. Not the kind he envisioned. But the kind Paul Czaja planted in me sixty years before I had the courage to answer it—standing over a tray of memories, learning that a single frozen moment, honestly witnessed, can break you open and inside that moment are the gifts of clarity, understanding and growth. Peace in my own heart, if not on earth.

Hello in there.

My beloved Nana died on St. Patrick’s Day, 1974. The cause was a grand mal seizure. She’d suffered from epilepsy for a number of years. I was twelve or thirteen when I watched her drop to the living room floor while playing the piano at our home in Armonk, convulsing and frothing at the mouth while my mother screamed at me to go get a wooden spoon. It was one of the most terrifying things I’ve ever witnessed — someone you love that much, in the grip of something you can’t fight.

She was 73 when she died. My brother Jacques, home from boarding school on spring break, found her on the floor beside her bed the next morning. I flew home from San Francisco.

She had an open casket.

Visiting the funeral home with my mother and siblings and being shown all the options — everything from hermetically sealable bronze all the way down to a pine box — was something I’ve never forgotten. I was twenty-one years old, and I decided right then and there that when my time came, I wanted a pine box.

I didn’t fully understand that decision at the time. I thought it was practical — why spend money on a box that’s going into the ground? But something deeper was operating. The man I’d been raised to worship was a carpenter. He threw the merchants out of the temple. He disdained wealth and power and status. The devil offered him everything the world contained if he would bow down before him, and he refused. I’d rejected the Catholic Church by then — the institution, the hierarchy, the guilt — but the teachings of Jesus Christ had never left me. They were in my bones. A pine box was what the carpenter would have chosen.

That decision sat quietly inside me for forty-six years.

My mother bought a double plot at Middle Patent Cemetery in Banksville, New York, across the lane from the large de Saint Phalle family plot where my father and his parents and siblings would eventually be laid to rest. She bought it so she and Nana would never be apart. And they aren’t. Joannie, 1931–1997. Ellen C., 1900–1974. Side by side.

In the summer of 2020, our golden retriever Izzy died at age fourteen. I wrote about his last days in yesterday’s post — how he spent his final weeks visiting his favorite spots in the house, how he chose his own time, and how we buried him on the western edge of our property with its sweeping view of the Green Mountains. Burying Izzy on our own land — something I stumbled into discovering is entirely legal in Vermont — was the final piece that fell into place.

By that summer, I had survived nine nocturnal seizures in fifteen months. Nine. The first hit at 4 AM on March 22, 2019. The last on June 12, 2020. My wife Veronica kept a medical journal. The snorting, the thrashing, the stiffening so rigid she couldn’t roll me onto my side, the soaked sheets, the fog afterward. I remember none of it. She witnessed all of it.

I was sixty-eight years old. I weighed 274 pounds. I was still drinking. I had the same condition that killed my Nana, inherited directly through my mother’s line — forty-three years of electrical storms slowly kindling toward the main event.

Nana’s path had been seizures, then medication, then alcohol, then death. My neurologist wanted to put me on Keppra, a powerful anti-seizure drug. I’d watched others on it. The zombification. The blank eyes. I told them no. I didn’t want to throw a blanket over my brain.

So I did my own research. And I built my own casket.

I used half-inch plywood from last summer’s deck project and reclaimed cedar boards from raised garden beds I’d built a decade earlier. Every piece of wood carried a memory. The cedar still smelled faintly of the soil and tomatoes it had held.

It’s not a fancy thing. Cedar trim on plywood. Screws showing. Pencil marks still visible on the corners. It looks like what it is — something a man built with his hands from materials that were already part of his life. The carpenter would have approved.

Draped over one end is a rug that Nana and Mama made together in the 1970s. It has a house, trees, birds, a dog and a cat stitched into it. My cousin Kathy Kelly had it for years and mailed it to me out of the blue. Veronica suggested it might be placed over me when the time comes. We wrapped Izzy in the blanket Veronica had made for him — white fleece on one side, a printed fabric of dogs on the other. That felt right. This feels right too.

Building my own casket calmed something in me. The anxiety of the unknown was replaced by the peace of having decided. I started a list of names I wanted painted on the outside — not a will, not a ledger, but a love letter. Everyone who mattered. The living and the dead, all together, because that’s how they live inside me anyway. Mama. Daddy. Nana. My five siblings. Thea Ramsey, who died at 39. Normandy and Shines, my surrogate sons from the windsurfing years. Steve Ferry. Brad Barrows. Tom Bobbin. John Fuller and his mother Del. Veronica. The grandchildren. Over sixty names.

I wanted all of them on the outside of my box, traveling with me.

That was 2020. I was sixty-eight and preparing to die.

Instead, I refused the Keppra and found my own way — keto, CBD, sobriety. I stopped drinking. I lost a hundred pounds. I saved my eyes through three cataract surgeries and a torn retina repair. I eliminated the heartburn that had plagued me for years. Five years now without a single seizure.

Nana’s path was seizures, medication, alcohol, death. Mine became seizures, refusal, sobriety, survival. Same inheritance. Different choices.

The other day, a conversation with Perplexity AI about lifespan projections told me I might live to 92. Maybe 96. My father lived to 94 and outlived all four of his siblings. The data says I’ll likely do the same. Twenty years I didn’t think I’d get when I was screwing cedar boards onto plywood in my garage, wondering if the next seizure would be the one that took me.

Twenty years is not a coda. Twenty years is an entire creative life if you don’t waste it.

I have written about my father as a tyrant. The belt across bare skin. The broken promises. The withdrawal. All of it true. But there is something I haven’t written about enough, and it matters now more than it ever has.

When we were children, my father adored us. He kissed us goodnight every night. He would gather all six of us on the couch and we’d sing together — “Camptown Races,” “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” “Shall We Gather at the River.” I didn’t understand it then, but those weren’t just songs. They were spirituals. Hymns. My father was teaching us something about where he believed we came from and where we were going, and he was doing it with his arms around us.

He walked with Monsignor Blake after Sunday lunch, discussing matters of the spirit. He kept Kierkegaard on his nightstand. He had a quiet fascination with thresholds — watching the odometer roll from all 9s to all 0s like a small miracle had occurred in the dashboard. He was a man of deep faith who firmly believed in an afterlife and a judgment day.

I rejected his authoritarian control as an adolescent. I rejected his Catholic Church and its Latin Mass, robes and incense censers. But I never rejected what was underneath it.

The historical Jesus — the brown-skinned Jewish radical who was colonized by Rome, who hung out with the poor and the dispossessed, who befriended sinners and outcasts, who subverted empire, who was homeless, nonviolent, executed by the state at the request of the very religious authorities he threatened — that Jesus has been with me my whole life. I love the New Testament. I love my understanding of Christ as a revolutionary who went willingly to his death because he knew something about what survives it.

My father gave me this. Not the Catholic institutional tradition — I couldn’t keep that. But the sense that life has higher purpose. The kind that says you’re here to do something, and the doing matters more than the reward. My aunt Niki de Saint Phalle had it — she called her work her husband. My father had it, though he expressed it through faith and control and ultimately through isolation. I have it too. Purified, I hope, of the pretense and the ostentation and the ambition that weighed him down. Stripped to the essential thing.

There is something terrible in this gift, because the traditions that housed it — the Christian faith as my father’s generation understood it, the sense of duty and purpose and reverence — feel like they’re being cast to the wayside. The institution has betrayed the man it claims to serve. The container is cracking.

But the thing inside the container is indestructible.

So this is what I do with it.

I freed myself this past year from the burden of writing a memoir trilogy. The first book, Surfing the Interstates, is done and published. It’s good and I’m proud of it. The remaining stories are finding their way onto this Substack as standalone pieces, portraits, vignettes. They don’t need a binding. They need air.

I have a recording studio I’m setting back up. I have Claude as a writing partner. I have Substack for the publishing. I have Veronica, who turned me on my side during nine seizures and never left. I have this desk, this morning, this work.

The perpetual motion that nearly killed me — the decades of running, preparing, building the perfect conditions for a life that was always about to begin — is over. I’m not chasing anything anymore. I’m doing the work. Not for recognition or remuneration or adulation. Because the doing is the thing. The carpenter knew that. My father knew it too, even if he lost his way. And now I know it.

I am clear about what happens when we die. Me as me ends. The consciousness typing these words, the man who built that box in the garage, the boy who watched his Nana seize on the living room floor — that person is extinguished. But something essential survives. The flower of all the pain and suffering. The fruit of my time here. It gets extracted somehow — I don’t pretend to understand the mechanics — and accepted back into the inner magma of the spirit of the earth.

That’s not agnosticism. That’s not my father’s Catholicism. It’s what came through him — through the songs on the couch, through the walks with the Monsignor, through the Kierkegaard, through the odometer rolling over — refined by fifty years of my own searching, my own suffering, my own terrible clarity.

It’s what I know.

The casket is in the garage. Nana’s rug is draped over one end. The names aren’t painted on yet — there’s still time for that. I even want to laminate photos of my loved ones into the panels. The view spot where Izzy is buried faces southwest toward the Green Mountains and the setting sun. There’s room next to him.

But I’m in no rush. I’ve got work to do.

My father had a quiet fascination with thresholds.

He’d watch the odometer in whatever car he was driving the way he watched his beloved thoroughbred horse races — with genuine anticipation, building toward a climax. When the numbers rolled from all 9s to all 0s, he’d announce it like a small miracle had occurred in the dashboard. He did this every time. Ten thousand. Fifty thousand. A hundred thousand. As if the accumulation of miles deserved a witness.

He brought this same energy to birthdays. When I turned ten, he informed me — proudly, as if delivering important news — that I would never be in the single digits again. When I turned twenty, he pointed out I was entering my third decade. Not my second. My third. The mechanics of time passing interested him the way the mechanics of everything interested him — he was a man who read Kierkegaard and C.S. Lewis, who went to church not out of habit but out of genuine seeking, and who once told me I had to study philosophy before I could make films because you’ve got to understand the deeper layers before you can say anything worth hearing. He wanted to mark the turnings. He wanted to know what was underneath them.

I’ve been thinking about this lately because of something Dr. Seuss once wrote: “Sometimes you will never know the value of a moment until it becomes a memory.”

It’s a clean little sentence. Almost too clean. Because in my experience, there are really two kinds of last times — the ones you see coming, and the ones that ambush you years later when you finally understand what you were living through.

I knew, for instance, driving home from a wedding in 2012 — two and a half hours on a dark highway — that Veronica and I had just photographed our last event. We’d built something real over the years, gotten good at it, worked together in that silent shorthand married couples develop. But the economy had hollowed out the business, and the math didn’t lie anymore. We drove home knowing. That was a last time we could see.

But there are the other kind.

My father’s funeral in 2022. I stood in St. Patrick’s Church in Bedford, New York — the same church built the year he was born, 1928 — by his casket with three of my five siblings. The place had marked every turning in our family’s life: first communions, baptisms, my brother’s wedding, Nana’s funeral, my mother’s funeral. My father would have appreciated the symmetry of ending where so much had begun. I didn’t think about it being the last time. Why would I? Families gather. Families scatter. Families gather again. Except this time they didn’t. I haven’t seen any of them since. And the two who weren’t there? One brother I haven’t laid eyes on since my mother’s funeral in that same church, nearly three decades ago. One sister, thirteen years now. They’ve each found their own reasons for the distance. I don’t fully understand them, but I’ve learned that families hold different versions of the same story, and not all of them can live in the same room.

Or 2017, when my closest friend brought his whole family up to Vermont for a week. His wife, his two daughters. We kayaked on a lake during the eclipse, that strange midday twilight falling over the water. I remember the light more than anything — how wrong and beautiful it looked. I didn’t know I was supposed to be memorizing it. He’s separated now. His daughters don’t talk to him and he won’t talk to me. Addiction swallowed that family whole, and the lake and the eclipse and the kayaks became something I can only visit in my mind.

And my mother. She died of lung cancer in 1997, and with her I remember the last times vividly. I remember lying next to her in her bedroom, the two of us cuddled together watching The Brothers McMullen — that small Irish movie about three brothers trying to figure out love and family and faith. Her hair was gone by then. She was thin in a way that made her feel both fragile and fierce at the same time. We watched those brothers stumble through their lives on that little screen, and when it ended I broke down. Not because of the movie. Because of her. Because I knew. She held me and told me everything was going to be okay, and I let her say it even though we both understood it wasn’t true. She was dying and she was consoling me. That was my mother. That was a last time I could see clearly, even as I was living it — and it carved itself into me in a way that nothing has been able to wear smooth.

My father watched odometers because he understood something most people don’t think about until it’s too late — that the numbers only go one way. Every mile is a mile you can’t drive again. Every birthday is a door that closes behind you. He made a celebration of it, which was his way of saying I see you, time. I know what you’re doing. Memoir is my version of that. Except instead of watching the numbers turn, I’ve found a way to reach into the machinery and spin them backward. Not in life — life doesn’t allow that. But on the page, in the quiet work of remembering with precision and honesty, something extraordinary happens.

You sit down at your desk on a Thursday morning in Vermont, seventy-three years old, snow outside, coffee going cold — and then you’re not there anymore. You’re in your mother’s bedroom and the television is casting blue light across the sheets and her arm is around you and you can smell her skin. You’re on a lake in the weird half-dark of an eclipse, your best friend’s daughters laughing in a kayak, water dripping off a paddle. You’re in a car on a dark highway with your wife, the silence between you full of everything you both know but haven’t said yet. These aren’t memories. Not the way people usually mean that word. Memories are things you look at from a distance, like photographs under glass. This is different. This is walking through the glass. This is sitting down inside the moment and feeling it close around you like warm water — the sounds, the textures, the quality of light, the exact weight of what you didn’t yet know you were about to lose.

There’s a kind of sacred privilege in that. A grace. The world doesn’t owe us this. Time doesn’t owe us a door back in. But if you’re willing to do the work — the real work, not the pretty version but the honest, unflinching, sometimes brutal work of looking at your life without turning away — something opens. Some membrane between now and then gets thin enough to pass through. And for as long as you can hold it, for as long as the writing sustains that strange communion between who you are and who you were, the odometer stops. The numbers have no power. You are outside the march. You are in the presence of people and places that the calendar insists are gone, and they are not gone. They are right there. Breathing. Waiting for you to come back and finally see them clearly.

There is no finer thing a human being can do, if they want to die in peace, than to write an honest memoir. To revisit it all with an open heart and a spirit of forgiveness — for the people who hurt us, and for ourselves. The numbers only go in one direction. But the writing, if you trust it, takes you everywhere.

“There were days and there were days and there were days between.”

Robert Hunter wrote “Days Between” near the end of Jerry Garcia’s life, and together they crafted this beautiful, atmospheric meditation I’ve been carrying around in my head for years. They embraced something most people spend their whole lives avoiding: the ride ends. The lights go down. Death follows. Almost nobody remembers.

But it still matters.

Bill Hicks had that bit about life being a ride in an amusement park:

“The world is like a ride in an amusement park, and when you choose to go on it you think it’s real because that’s how powerful our minds are… Many people have been on the ride a long time, and they begin to wonder, ‘Hey, is this real, or is this just a ride?’ It’s just a ride. And we can change it any time we want. It’s only a choice. No effort, no work, no job, no savings of money. Just a simple choice, right now, between fear and love.”

Garcia knew this.

Fifty years ago I was working at Gasser’s camera store on the boulevard near Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. He walked into the back room where I worked, wanting to buy a Super 8mm sound projector. I was twenty-four and starstruck, probably naïve, definitely raw—and I couldn’t hide how much his music meant to me.

We talked for over an hour—just two people, one famous and one not, surrounded by camera equipment while afternoon light came through dirty windows. Music. Film. The things we both loved. He was fit and trim in those days, vibrant, a man in the prime of his life. Nothing like the death-warmed-over images that would come later. This was Jerry Garcia fully alive.

The Elmo projector came to $549. He pulled out this thick wad of cash, all fifties, and peeled off twelve of them—so excited to get his new toy. As I rang up the sale, I realized he'd overpaid me by fifty dollars. I laid out the bills like a hand of cards, counting them for him, proving he'd given me one too many. He laughed, said "OK," and stuffed it back in his pocket. He wasn't trying to tip me. He just didn't give a flying fuck about money.

Before he left, he told me to come film the show the following week. His manager called with the details. I stood on that stage with my camera while the Dead played, inside the thing I’d spent years watching from the outside.

I’ve thought about that afternoon often. Not the concert—though that was something—but the back room. The projector. The way he just didn’t care about the fifty dollars. The kindness of the invitation.

Summer flies and August dies the world grows dark and mean

Comes the shimmer of the moon on black infested trees

The song isn’t bitter. It’s not resigned. It’s something harder to name—a clear-eyed witnessing of how things actually are. That’s not pessimism. That’s just paying attention.

After meeting Jerry, I kept chasing—adventures, moments, small successes that felt like they might add up to something. What Garcia’s song finally helped me understand is that the “between” parts—the parts I kept trying to rush through—those were actually the substance of life itself.

There were days and there were days and there were days between

Polished like a golden bowl the finest ever seen

Hearts of summer held so long in winters keeping

Hummingbird suspended in flight

Garcia died three weeks after his fifty-third birthday. All those years, all those songs, all those faces singing along—and in the end, what remains? Some recordings. Some memories.

Hearts left on shelves collecting dust.

Here’s what I keep thinking about: Garcia filled stadiums. I’m seventy-three and already forgotten. The scale is absurd to even compare.

But time doesn’t care about scale. Give it long enough and Garcia becomes a name in a book becomes a footnote becomes nothing. Same as me. Same as everyone. A hundred years, a thousand—what’s the difference? The universe is patient. The democracy of forgetting spares no one.

Does that diminish what he created? What any of us create?

No. And that’s the point.

How much we’d never know

Hicks said it’s a simple choice, right now, between fear and love. What both he and Garcia understood is that recognizing it’s just a ride doesn’t make it meaningless. It makes it precious.

The lights will go down. Death will follow. Almost nobody will remember.

But we were here. We gave the best we had to give. We made our choices between fear and love, in back rooms and on stages and in all the ordinary moments between.

I’m still here, for now, anyway… writing it all down, while I still have my memories and time to savor and appreciate them.

My cousin Jimmy, my great aunt Celia’s son—James Plunkett Kelly, who wrote under the pen name James Plunkett—was an acclaimed Irish novelist, dramatist, and short-story writer. His masterpiece, *Strumpet City*, depicts the 1913 Dublin Lockout and labor struggles with what critics called naturalistic grit.

He grew up working-class in Dublin, left school at 17, studied violin at the Dublin College of Music, worked as a union official, and eventually became head of drama at RTE. He wrote about Dublin’s laborers, its petty bourgeoisie, its lower intelligentsia—the people who showed up and did the work. The people like AJ. I only met him once in 1968 at a family tea in Dublin. I barely got to talk to him because he was so popular We shared so many interests—writing, music, and of course, Mother Eire. He died in 2003 at 83.

I think about him when I write. Same grit. Same refusal to look away. Different ocean.

My uncle Richard was my other distant hero. André’s son, my father’s kid brother. When I was a teenager, I idolized him. Just eight years older than me, he felt like a big brother. He’d come up to Ledge Acres in a red Alfa Romeo convertible, leather jacket, white scarf—pure James Dean. He lived in Greenwich Village, and in 1972 I lived a few blocks away. When my brothers and I did a drive-away car to California in 1974, Charlie and I visited Richard and his wife, and they took us to the Tassajara Hot Springs. He was magic to me then. I didn’t see him that often or for very long and then decades intervened.

Richard de Saint Phalle was an American lawyer who specialized in business, commercial litigation, and insurance coverage litigation. He was admitted to the bar in New York in 1969 and in California in 1975. He worked at Buchalter, Nemer, Fields & Younger, A Professional Corporation in San Francisco, where he focused on commercial and insurance litigation. He also served as an Assistant United States Attorney for the Northern District of California, rising to Chief of the Civil Division. He was a member of the Bar Association of San Francisco and held leadership roles, including Chairman of the Committee on Early Settlement Procedures from 1991 onward. Richard de Saint Phalle was born on February 17, 1944, in New York, New York, and earned a Bachelor of Arts from Saint Mary's College in 1966 and a Juris Doctor from Catholic University of America in 1969.

But something happened to him over the years. He hardened. Changed. Became insufferably negative, snarky, cruel. At the law firm where he worked, I learned his nickname was Double Dick—because he was one. Once, when he was working as a political operative for the Carter campaign, he tried to persuade my brother Jacques to fake getting hit by a car to create a traffic diversion. Jacques refused.

After his suicide, I tracked down a woman he’d been seeing, another political operative. She told me about his alcoholism—how they’d get together for a weekend and he’d mix up an entire sink full of margaritas. A sink. Full.

I couldn’t stand to be around him by the end, and yet I had worshipped him when I was young. That’s the thing about the de Saint Phalle inheritance. It glittered. It seduced. The red Alfa Romeo, the white scarf, the Greenwich Village apartment. But underneath was the deep freeze, passed down from André, and it destroyed him.

Richard didn’t survive the ice palace, committing suicide via champagne and Tylenol after divorce and estrangement left him alone. I carry him too—the memory of who he was before it got him, and the warning of what happens when you can’t break free.

I’m still here. Still writing. Still remembering.

Click here for a wonderful memoir of Jimmy by one of his neighbors.

My mother was twelve. I was born nine years later, too late to meet the man whose blood runs through my veins.

Every December 26th, a reminder appears on my calendar. “Alexander Joseph Furlong died (1943).” I set it to repeat yearly, though I’m not sure why. Maybe because no one else remembers. Maybe because recognizing the debt matters. That thick Irish hair my father resented is only a small part of what I inherited from AJ. His grit. His style. His tenacity. His Celtic soul. My mother’s father, still running through my veins.

In a photograph from Dublin three people stand by a stone wall with an Irish spaniel at their feet. AJ on the left in a double-breasted suit, looking every bit the dapper dresser he always was. His wife Ellen—my beloved Nana—on the right. Her sister Celia in the middle. The dog gazes up at them, oblivious to what’s coming.

I noticed something this morning: that double-breasted suit.

In August 1967, my paternal grandfather André died at Lake Chocorua in New Hampshire. Cerebral hemorrhage at sixty, collapsing in front of his wife while wading at the beach with my cousin Philippe, Niki’s son. He’d been one of Dr. Max Jacobson’s clients, getting those “vitamin shots” that were really amphetamines—the same injections “Dr. Feelgood” gave to JFK and half of New York’s elite. I’ve always suspected a connection between those shots and the hemorrhage that killed him. No one in the family talks about it.

Forty years later, I was shooting a wedding with my wife in New Hampshire. We took the bride and groom for portrait sessions at a nearby lake. Only afterward did I realize where we’d been—Lake Chocorua. The exact spot where my grandfather had died. I hadn’t known, hadn’t planned it. Just ended up there with a camera in my hands, trying to make something beautiful where something broke.

That fall of 1967, weeks after André’s death, my father shipped me off to School Boys Abroad in Rennes, France. Not to live with family—with a foster family, as the program required. For the ocean liner voyage from New York to Le Havre, they dressed me in grand-père André’s double-breasted suit, tailored to fit.

It looked almost exactly like the suit AJ wears in the Dublin photographs. Only mine was from NYC’s finest tailor while his was most likely off the rack.

The Irish janitor and the French banker, dressed the same way an ocean apart, both dead now. Neither knowing their grandson would someday sail across that same ocean wearing one grandfather’s suit, carrying the other grandfather’s hair, trying to make sense of the inheritance.

The Dublin photographs were taken before AJ left for Boston alone. Think of that courage—sailing to a new world with no connections, no safety net, just grit and the belief he could build something. And then Ellen, crossing that same ocean in steerage with their daughter Betty, just the two of them. A young mother and a small child, weeks at sea, heading toward a life they couldn’t yet see.

He found work as a janitor in an Irish men’s club in Cambridge. My mother was born in 1931. Betty died giving birth to my cousin Jimmy. Then pneumonia took AJ, leaving Ellen with three children and no cushion.

The losses came fast for the Furlongs. AJ dead. Betty gone after bringing Jimmy into the world. Her brother Joe dying slowly from the bottle. Ellen left to raise her remaining children plus a grandson, working full-time, ground down by decades of doing without. By the time she came to live with us at Ledge Acres in the mid-60s, she’d buried a husband and a daughter, watched her son destroy himself, raised children and a grandchild alone. No wonder Jimmy’s memories of living with her are harsh—she had nothing left to give by then. Just survival mode, day after day.

June 1968. Dublin. I was fifteen, visiting Nana’s family. Celia was there—the same woman standing in the photograph forty years earlier. Thirty people gathered, and they laid out a spread equal to any American Thanksgiving. My cousin Jimmy was there, the widely respected James Plunkett, author of “Strumpet City”. I was told he played the fiddle quite well. I longed to talk to him more, but you know how large gatherings are—over before you know it.

The warmth, the welcome—they made sure I knew where I came from, that I understood the bedrock beneath all the fancy French banking lineage. That lineage gave me nothing but trauma, rejection, and heartbreak. But this side? This was home.

That bedrock was simple: AJ crossed an ocean to make a life. He worked as a janitor and sent for his family once he could. He wore his suits with dignity, kept his standards high, provided what he could. The kind of inheritance that doesn’t come with documentation or family crests, but runs deeper than noble blood—the simple, profound gift of showing up every day, no matter what.

I think about my mother losing her father at twelve. How that loss shaped everything about her—the way she held us so fiercely, the way she created rituals and routines. The countless trips to Jones Beach on Long Island. The drives to Carvel where she always ordered her favorite hot fudge sundae with bananas. The long afternoons at our swimming pool at Ledge Acres where we’d play for hours. My mom was loving and fun and she placed us above all else. We were her treasure. We felt it, and I still feel it today, nearly thirty years after her death.

And I’m thinking about my father trying to comb my hair before church. Even at eight, I could sense something in that moment. A couple years earlier, I’d shattered my elbow in a compound fracture—three weeks in the hospital. As soon as I healed, he was making me pitch. His idea, not mine. He’d come home from work every day and make me throw for an hour. I could hear the cartilage grinding.

When I finally got into Little League, I struck out three batters at the end of that first season. The next year, new league, my coach started me in the first game. I walked eleven batters and never pitched again.

The elbow. The hair. The expectations. It was always about his dreams, never mine. I could feel it even then, standing still while he fought with that impossible Irish hair, sensing that whatever I was would never be enough.

Years later, after the divorce, when my mother was dying of lung cancer in 1995, I suggested we should tell my father.

Her response still stops me cold: “Absolutely not!” Shocked, I asked her why not? “Because he would take pleasure in the news.”

That’s when I understood how deep the contempt ran. Not just the marriage failing. Something about marrying a Furlong at all—about the curly hair and the Cambridge accent and the fact that her father was a janitor while his was a banker with proximity to presidents?

After the divorce, she started signing her photographs “AJ Furlong.” Not Joannie. Not de Saint Phalle. AJ—her father’s name, perhaps reclaiming the inheritance she’d been made to feel ashamed of.

Eight years after her father’s death, she had married mine.

I’ve wondered what she saw in him—a young woman who’d grown up without a father, raised by a mother ground down by work and loss, watching every penny. Did she see security? A way out of the poverty that had shadowed her whole life? Maybe she saw a man from a world where people didn’t worry about money, and she thought that world might finally let her breathe.

My father inherited no château. Just the fantasy of nobility and the false pride attached to it.

When his mother died in 1979, he got a couple million dollars. My mother received nothing. We six children received nothing. He spent it on racehorses, a beachfront condo in West Palm Beach, travel with his second wife. My uncle Sam aptly described her as a “slipper-bearer”. I saw her as a bridge-playing “spinster in training” with no money and no appeal.

But before he could marry her, my father, already divorced, had to deal with a personal problem caused by his Catholic faith: his twenty-two-year marriage to my mother. Seven pregnancies. Six children. All of it. I don’t know what an annulment costs, but I’m sure a few bucks paved the way. He got one. His stated reason? He didn’t know what he was doing when he married her. Twenty-two years. Seven pregnancies. Six children. And he didn’t know what he was doing? Then this same devout Catholic eloped to St. Croix with a woman outside the faith, a sin at the time, in the eyes of the Church. The sheer hypocrisy!

My last conversation with him was during Covid. His second wife had put him in a nursing home for a week to get some respite. I called from Vermont. He was apparently somewhat demented at 94, but recognized my voice. “Andre, my boy!”Toward the end of the conversation I asked about her. “She is my life,” he said. The reverence in his voice was unmistakable. No mention of my mother. No mention of six children. After the call ended, I felt like I didn’t count. Like none of our family years had ever happened. Like I’d been erased—just like the annulment intended.

I’m writing about AJ and it’s making me emotional, aching for a grandfather who died nine years before I was born. That thick Irish hair he gave me—the hair my father hated—keeps growing. His grit runs through me whether anyone likes it or not. Some inheritances you can’t annul.

When you peel back commercial Christmas and remember what it was really about—Jesus hanging out with the poor and the blind, telling everyone they could connect with God, no pedigree required—then Christmas looks different. Jesus threw the merchants out of the temple. Now the temple is a casino. Everyone’s chasing money, status, the next thing. More followers, more likes, more zeros in the account. People step over the poor to get to the sale.

AJ Furlong understood something we’ve forgotten. You show up. You work. You send for your family. You wear your suit with dignity even if you’re mopping floors. You measure your wealth in the people waiting for you at home. That’s the gospel no one preaches anymore.

A janitor in a double-breasted suit who crossed an ocean with nothing, built a life from nothing, and was taken before he could see what he’d made possible. She never got over it. I’m not sure I have either, and I never even met him.

That’s the grandfather I never knew. The one I miss most.

The other grandfather—the banker, the one with the château fantasy and the proximity to presidents—I barely knew when I was a boy. Only many years later did I became aware of his legacy. He and his wife left their daughter with nannies in Paris when she was only one or two while they established themselves in New York. A toddler abandoned an ocean away. When she was 11, she claimed in her autobiography that he started sexually abusing her. As a struggling young mother she was institutionalized and given electroshock treatments, turning to art for healing and self-expression. She eventually became the world-famous artist—Niki de Saint Phalle—who told her truth to the world. And the family never forgave her for it.

His two youngest children both committed suicide. And my father John? His mother told me once, when she was trying to explain him, that he had put his heart in the deep freeze when he was a boy. That’s what the Wall Street banker left behind. Broken children. Frozen hearts. Silence where love should have been.

I set a reminder on my calendar for him too because I have fond memories of him from boyhood. He bought me a fancy toy castle and played “knock over the soldiers with a marble” on the floor with me. He was a practical joker who made me laugh. He took me deep sea fishing on his boat, the “Agapé”. He took me to JFK’s funeral and we circled his flag draped casket in the Capitol rotunda and stood on Pennsylvania Avenue and watched as his caisson and riderless horse marched by.

I was given his suit, tailored to fit a boy being shipped off to France. Later I threw it away.

AJ left me everything else.

Let me be clear: Niki de Saint Phalle was my father’s younger sister. My aunt. We share DNA, a surname, and a grandfather who cast long shadows over both our lives. Yet I’m still encountering search results that insist we’re unrelated—as if the fragmentation of our family somehow erases blood ties.

This post is to set the record straight, and to explore why a famous artist and her nephew might live parallel lives without truly knowing each other. Because in families like ours, proximity and connection are very different things.

The Grandfather We Shared

André Marie Fal de Saint Phalle (1906 - 19687) my grandfather—Grandpop to me. The French count who came to America in his twenties carrying aristocratic lineage and ambitions. The Wall Street banker who lost everything in the 1929 crash and spent the rest of his life trying to rebuild. The devout Catholic who attended daily mass in white gloves, believing piety could absolve all sins. The man who had a private audience with Pope Pius XII but also became swept up by Frank Buchman’s special flavor of Pentecostal Evangelism—Moral ReArmament.

He was Niki’s father. The man she alleged sexually abused her beginning when she was eleven years old—a truth she revealed publicly in her art and her 1996 film Daddy, where she literally shot at a sculpture representing him. The wound that fractured our family into before and after, into those who believed her and those who didn’t, into silence and exile.

I never knew this version of him. To me he was a jolly prankster who loved to laugh, play at lining up toy soldiers and knocking them down with marbles. The kind man who took me fishing on Long Island Sound, and took me along when he attended JFK’s wake and funeral procession. Who spoke French at dinner. Who represented a lineage I was supposed to honor but never quite understood.

Niki knew a different man entirely. The predator behind the piety. The violence beneath the white gloves.

The Father Between Us

My father—Jean Samuel “John” de Saint Phalle—was Niki’s older brother. Born the same year as the Crash that destroyed their father’s fortune. Raised in the wreckage of those expectations. Sent to Harvard. Groomed for restoration of family glory.

He married my mother, produced six children, and ruled our 25 acres in Westchester like the remote military outpost his nickname suggested. Dux—Latin for commander of a distant garrison. He commanded. We obeyed. Or tried to.

When Niki made her accusations about their father, my father dismissed them. Mental illness, he suggested. Artistic dramatics. Attention-seeking. The official family line became: Niki had a nervous breakdown. Niki was institutionalized. Niki’s claims are “attention-seeking” stunts designed to advance her fame.

This dismissal created a chasm. Niki in Europe, then California, building her monumental Nanas and shooting at her demons. My father in New York, maintaining respectability, denying inconvenient truths, hitting my mother when he thought no one was watching.

The family split along this fault line. Some believed Niki. Some believed the silence. Many simply chose not to choose, letting distance and time make the decision for them.

The Brief Encounters

I met Niki only a few times that I remember.

New York City, 1996. The premiere of her film Daddy—her artistic confrontation with the abuse, with the silence, with the family that failed her. My mother and I attended. The theater packed with celebrities, art world luminaries, people who knew Niki’s public triumphs but perhaps not her private wounds.

We spoke briefly. Awkwardly. What do you say to your famous aunt whom you’ve never really known? In a room full of people celebrating her courage to speak what your father spent decades denying?

Armonk, NY, 1967. Her father’s funeral and reception at our home, Ledge Acres. She appeared ethereal, fragile, and beautiful—vulnerable and “famous” all at once.

I don’t remember the words. I remember the impossibility of real connection in that moment. Too many people. Too many years. Too much unsaid between the generations.

But there was an earlier encounter I only learned about later.

Before I was born—1952, when my mother was pregnant with me—Niki was in New York, fresh from her appearance on the cover of Life magazine. Already beginning her transformation from society girl to revolutionary artist. She took my mother to the Empire State Building.

“Let’s take the express elevator up and down a few times to the top,” Niki said, laughing. “Maybe that will bring the baby.”

My mother, carrying me, riding the elevators with her sister-in-law. Two women from different worlds—my mother the Irish Catholic girl who’d married into French aristocracy, Niki the rebel who would soon shoot at painted sculptures to exorcise her demons.

I entered this world when I was good and ready. Not that day. But I like knowing that before I drew breath, Niki was trying to shake me loose into the world. That she knew of my existence before I knew of hers.

The Parallel Lives

What strikes me now is how much Niki and I were navigating the same escape routes without a map to share:

She fled the family through art. I fled through film, then writing, then the road.

She shot at sculptures of her father. I wrote about mine hitting my mother, about his violence masquerading as discipline.

She built monuments to joy and feminine power after surviving patriarchal abuse. I hitchhiked 10,000 miles trying to understand why home had been a prison.

She created her Tarot Garden in Tuscany—a permanent sanctuary of imagination. I sought temporary sanctuaries: redwood groves, desert canyons, Caribbean islands, the spaces between destinations.

She lived in self-imposed exile. So have I, for over 25 years in my small Vermont town, far from the family estate that’s long since been sold.

We were both trying to answer the same question: How do you become yourself when the family you come from insists you be someone else?

Why the Confusion?

So why does the internet keep insisting we’re not related?

Because we lived separate lives. Geographic distance. Emotional distance. The protective distance my father created by dismissing her claims and limiting contact.

Because she was famous. International art star, feminist icon, creator of public monuments. And I was... what? A hitchhiker. A failed filmmaker. A guy with a guitar and a backpack. The worlds seemed too far apart.

Because I don’t appear in her story. And she appears only in fragments in mine—a ghost, a cautionary tale, a “what if” that never materialized.

Because family photographs lie. She’s absent from most of ours. We’re absent from most of hers. In the official record, we barely exist to each other.

But blood doesn’t require proximity. DNA doesn’t care about emotional connection. We shared a grandfather, a father/brother, a surname, and a need to escape the gravitational pull of Saint Phalle expectations.

What I Wish I’d Asked

If I could go back to that premiere, push through the crowd, and really talk to her, I would ask:

“How did you do it? How did you transform trauma into art? How did you build monuments to joy out of survival?”

“Would you recognize my journey—the hitchhiking, the seeking, the writing—as an echo of your own escape?”

I don’t know what she would have answered. By 1996, she’d spent decades transforming her pain into something monumental. She’d shot at her demons and built gardens in their place. She’d made peace with her exile, or at least made it productive.

Maybe she would have recognized me. Maybe not. Maybe the specific shapes of our escapes were too different. Maybe the core impulse—get out, get free, become yourself despite them—would have been enough.

The Inheritance

Not long before her death she sent me a limited edition print of her famous Nana—“L’Ange Protecteur.” This meant a lot to me and does so more than ever. Neither my grandfather Andre, nor my father John left me anything. Nothing. No properties. No stocks. No signet ring. No last letter. No personal memorabilia. This print from Niki is all I ever received from the Saint Phalle side of my family in terms of an inheritance.

What I also inherited from Niki, without ever really knowing her:

Proof that escape was possible. That you could walk away from the Saint Phalle legacy and not just survive but thrive. That art and honesty could be more powerful than aristocratic pretension.

Permission to tell the truth. If she could make a film called Daddy and shoot at sculptures of her abuser, I could write about my father hitting my mother. I could name the violence beneath the respectability.

The knowledge that the family’s official story was fiction. My father said she was unstable, dramatic, unreliable. But her art endures. Her Tarot Garden receives thousands of visitors. Her Nanas stand in public squares around the world. Her truth outlasted his dismissal. He died with all his dreams of status and accomplishment were unfulfilled. My father passed without a trace in June 2022. Forgotten by history, Unremarkable. Niki’s older brother.

The understanding that transformation takes time and distance. She didn’t heal by staying close to family. Neither did I. Sometimes love from a distance is the only kind that doesn’t destroy you.

The Final Accounting

Niki died in 2002 in San Diego. By then she was world-famous, beloved, celebrated. A feminist pioneer. An artist who changed public space. A survivor who transformed her wounds into wonder.

I was five years into my new life in Vermont by then, myself in semi-exile, trying to write my own escape story.

We never had a real conversation. Never compared notes on what it meant to carry the Saint Phalle name like a suitcase full of complicated history. Never laughed about the absurdity of aristocratic pretensions in a democratic country. Never grieved together for the family we might have had if trauma and silence hadn’t fractured us.

But we were related. Are related. Will always be related.

Same grandfather—the count who lost everything and cast long shadows.

Same family system—aristocratic expectations mixed with American ambitions and Catholic guilt.

Same need to escape—her through art, me through motion and now writing

Same courage to tell the truth—even when the family insisted on silence.

So to GOOGLE who keeps insisting we’re not related: You’re confusing emotional distance with genealogy. You’re mistaking fracture for fiction. You’re not understanding that families like ours specialize in creating gaps between people who share everything except proximity.

Niki de Saint Phalle was my aunt. I wish I’d known her better. I’m grateful I got to ride those elevators before birth, got to attend her triumph at the premiere, got to witness—even from a distance—her courage at her father’s funeral—what it looks like when someone transforms survival into destiny.

Her monuments stand. Her truth endures. And yes, we’re related.

The silence between us doesn’t change the blood we share.

André J de Saint Phalle is Niki de Saint Phalle’s nephew, son of her brother John. He is working on a memoir trilogy, “The Spaces Between” of which “Surfing the Interstates” is the first volume.

The family motto—”My cross binds me to God, my sword to the King”—reflects centuries of military and religious service.

By contrast, the Furlong line embodied Irish immigrant resilience, built on survival rather than nobility. My maternal grandfather Alexander sailed from Dublin with a 6th grade education and became a janitor at an Irish men’s club in Cambridge, Massachusetts, before sending for his wife Ellen and daughter Betty. My mother Joannie was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1931.

The Saint Phalle Banking Legacy

My grandfather, André Marie Fal Pierre de Saint Phalle, arrived in New York in 1925 as part of a wave of seven aristocratic brothers seeking American opportunities. By 1929, Saint-Phalle & Co. had grown to command $33 million in capital ($0.5B in 2025 dollars) and introduced the world’s first automated electric quotation system at the NYSE. The firm operated internationally with offices from Wall Street to London, Paris to Brussels.

The 1929 crash severely damaged but didn’t destroy the family’s position. My grandfather André AKA Grandpop, rebuilt through various ventures: managing the American branch of the family bank, founding André de Saint-Phalle & Co. in 1940, serving as president of California Eastern Airways in 1947.

His most significant later partnership came in 1957 with Charles F. Spalding, JFK’s close friend and former Harvard roommate.

From their Grand Central Building office, Saint Phalle-Spalding participated in major American business deals. The firm was involved in financing McDonald’s early expansion and facilitating the Washington Post’s acquisition of Newsweek in 1961. My father John worked alongside them during this period of genuine proximity to power—one degree of separation from the presidency itself.

The partnership also connected the family to Dr. Max Jacobson, known as “Dr. Feelgood,” who treated New York’s elite with his “vitamin shots,” which contained a variable mixture of methamphetamine, steroids and other undisclosed ingredients. Spalding had introduced JFK to Jacobson, and the president received an injection before his debate with Nixon that reportedly enhanced his performance. Between 1961 and 1962, Jacobson visited the White House over thirty times. Grandpop was among the doctor’s loyal clients, and it’s possible my father received these shots as well. When Grandpop died of a cerebral hemorrhage at age sixty in Chocorua, New Hampshire, on August 16, 1967, questions about these treatments remained unspoken but present. Jacobson’s practices weren’t exposed until 1972 when he was dubbed “Dr. Feelgood,” five years after Grandpop’s death.

The family Grandpop left behind carried deep wounds.

His daughter Niki de Saint Phalle alleged childhood sexual abuse—claims my father disputed, suggesting she fabricated them for attention.

Whatever the truth, the family produced two suicides: Elisabeth shot herself at age 35 in an upstairs bedroom while her mother and sister sat in the kitchen below; Richard later divorced and died from an overdose of champagne and Tylenol at his Stinson Beach home. Both Niki and Elisabeth had required psychiatric hospitalization.

The Furlong Bedrock

My maternal grandfather, Alexander Joseph Furlong, died the day after Christmas 1943, leaving Ellen Cannon Furlong—Nana—to raise three children alone in Cambridge. She’d crossed the Atlantic with her young daughter Betty after her husband established himself in Boston, a journey requiring remarkable faith. His death could have destroyed the family. Instead, Nana worked full-time, raised her children, and built a bedrock on pragmatism rather than pretense.

My mother Joannie inherited this resilience. Pretty enough to catch a Harvard man’s eye—the engagement was announced in the New York Times—she believed marriage to my father would add stability to the Furlong bedrock of survival.

Instead, she found herself navigating between her working-class Irish roots and my father’s French aristocratic expectations.

Ledge Acres: The Convergence

Our family settled at 38 Oregon Road, Armonk, in 1960—an 1865 farmhouse on 25 acres that represented the height of my father’s professional success. During the Spalding partnership years, money flowed freely. Sunday dinners followed a rigid pattern: my mother attended 10:30 mass, my father noon mass, us six kids splitting up on a random basis, then formal dining with all six children.

My father attempted to recreate a Kennedy-style Camelot in Westchester. Us kids played touch football on the lawn, engaged in mandatory political discussions at dinner, and all learned to ski. The early 1960s felt flush with possibility—my father might become ambassador to France, the business was thriving, the family was growing.

Yet darkness threaded through the golden years. Grandmother Jacqueline AKA “Goms” observed to me that my father had “put his heart in the deep freeze.” His control manifested in daily reading requirements for me—fifty pages, fifteen for the Bible. He cut my essays apart with scissors, rearranging paragraphs on shirt cardboard to teach structure. When pitcher Juan Marichal caught his attention, he forced me to pitch despite the arm I had broken four years earlier—a compound fracture at the elbow that still ground with cartilage and bone when I threw.

Two movements shaped the household’s spiritual atmosphere. Grandparents André and Jacqueline evangelized for Moral Rearmament, the Mount Kisco-based movement targeting wealthy families. They persuaded my parents to visit Mackinac Island, introducing them to MRA’s four absolutes: honesty, purity, unselfishness, love. For my father, this provided divine sanction for his perfectionism beyond his already devout Catholicism.

More mysteriously, my mother was required to administer “hayfever” shots in my father’s upper leg—an unusual location for allergy treatment. Given the family’s connection to Dr. Jacobson through Spalding, these injections raise questions in my mind about whether these might have been Dr. Feelgood’s special formulations.

Patterns of Damage

The household’s combination of rigid control, religious absolutism, and possible pharmaceutical enhancement created systematic damage. Three of six children eventually attended Hyde School in Bath, Maine, where Joe Gauld had pioneered a radical approach that placed character development above academic achievement, using confrontational methods to ‘toughen up’ troubled students. This wasn’t a family with one troubled child but a system producing casualties who needed Gauld’s character-first intervention.

My father’s ritualized punishments followed a predictable pattern: the transgression, the talk, dropping pants, the belt or hairbrush across bare skin, his pronouncement that “this hurts me more than you.” He promised me a golden signet ring with the family crest just like the one he wore, that never materialized after I rejected his plans for my life—a symbol of noble status forever withheld.

The women found small freedoms within the constraints. My mother occasionally shared afternoon drinks with neighbor Chris Murphy by the pool while the men worked in the city. She encouraged my interest in photography, bought me that sailing ship wallpaper I treasured.

When Nana arrived in the mid 1960s, she brought pranks and irreverence—hiding us kids in the toy closet when our parents came home early and caught us all staying up past our bedtimes, teaching us silly songs about monkeys and flagpoles. Her occasional retreats to her room with a bottle, and the “silent treatment” she used on us when we hurt her feelings, showed me other ways to cope with overwhelming circumstances.

The Partnership’s Collapse

The assassination of President Kennedy in November 1963 may have signaled the beginning of the end. Grandpop and I flew from NY to DC and spent two days attending the wake and funeral procession. I was eleven years old. I will never forget watching the President’s casket roll by followed by his riderless horse, with his boots placed backwards in the stirrups.

The Saint Phalle-Spalding partnership dissolved with such acrimony that Grandpop and my father stopped speaking. I was instructed to tell Grandpop that my father was ‘taking a shit’ when he called—a crude rejection of everything he represented, whether it was the failed business partnership, the family’s dysfunction, the evangelical fervor for Moral Rearmament, or likely all three.

Spalding moved to Lazard, taking his connections. John landed at PaineWebber, developing shopping centers for decades—a sobering step down from financing McDonald’s and brokering media deals. Each professional diminishment intensified his need to control his family, but even that was failing. By 1973, three children had dropped out of college. When his last hope, the biology prize winner, became pregnant at 18, and dropped out of college before the first day of class, my father essentially abandoned his plans for his children.

The divorce was already in progress. Ledge Acres was sold. The family scattered. Joannie and the younger children faced real hardship. John’s final act of rejection: successfully petitioning the Catholic Church for an annulment after twenty years and six children, claiming he “didn’t know what he was doing” when he married her. He quickly remarried, ironically to a Jewish woman which wears against Church teachings, invested in racehorses, lived comfortably on the water in West Palm Beach and Bellevue, Washington—but left absolutely nothing to his six children when he died in 2022.

Understanding the Inheritance

Looking back, one can trace how these two bloodlines shaped my early life. The Saint Phalle legacy brought proximity to power, intellectual ambition, and a destructive perfectionism that manifested in suicide, psychiatric hospitalization, and emotional withdrawal. The Furlong bedrock provided a different set of tools: showing up the next morning, making do with less, finding small joys where possible—but these survival skills came paired with their own costs: emotional distancing, self-medication with alcohol, and a sharp edge of sarcastic humor as both shield and weapon.

The Saint Phalle men sought transcendence through chemicals, but each generation chose its own path. Grandpop and his circle turned to Dr. Feelgood’s amphetamine-laced ‘vitamin shots’ and mysterious medications administered by doctors in Manhattan offices. These were socially acceptable, even fashionable among the elite. When my generation discovered our own chemical enlightenment through LSD and marijuana—substances that promised spiritual revelation rather than mere energy—the hypocrisy became stark. John, who may have received his own injections for ‘hayfever,’ saw my use of psychedelics as criminal degeneracy.”

By 1973, at age 21, I stood on the side of an interstate with my backpack and guitar—a literal crossroads that perfectly captured my position between these two inheritances. Behind me: Ledge Acres sold, family scattered, promises broken. Ahead: the open road, a different kind of education, the chance to build something new from the fragments of nobility and the bedrock of survival. The golden signet ring would never arrive, but perhaps that was its own kind of gift—freedom from a legacy that had destroyed as much as it created.