Wikipedia: Stockdale exiting his A-4 fighter-bomber weeks before becoming a POW

I’ve had the “Stockdale Paradox” written out on a 3x5 card or a Post-It note above every single desk that I’ve worked at since 2011. I’ve never needed it more. Why? Well, first, let me tell you what it is…

The Stockdale Paradox really boils down to this statement by Admiral James Stockdale, quoted by author Jim C. Collins in his business management book called Good to Great:

“You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end — which you can never afford to lose — with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.” ~ Admiral Stockdale

First, I am going to concede that I am not a prisoner of war as was Admiral Stockdale, and any comparison that I make of my circumstances and his must be grounded in that concession. Nothing I am enduring is as bad as what he endured. I am grateful to him for enduring it; and I thank him for bringing this condensed wisdom back from the brink of death to share with us whiny bastards just complaining our way through normal civilian life.

But that aside, I will say that things have been pretty damn brutal here on the ground for me and my siblings since our father died just after Christmas in 2013.

Dealing with the death of a parent is not as tragic as dealing with the death of a child, for sure. But it can be a unique kind of super-adulting that I don’t think anyone ever feels old enough to do.

Right after our father died, our mother had a psychotic break with reality. She had to be hospitalized. We had the memorial for Dad without her; and because she has been hell on wheels for all of our lives, and for all of many peoples’ lives, a sigh of relief went up from the memorial crowd. Because she wasn’t there in all of her narcissistic “glory,” Dad’s memorial was about Dad. Because she wasn’t there, people were actually able to grieve the man. I was able to grieve the man. I thank G*d for that daily.

And when Mom got out of the mental hospital, a month or so later, she seemed okayish. But by 2014, she was once again on the brink of a psychotic break but insisted that she was fine. To get her enrolled in a geriatric rehabilitative program run by her home state (against her will) we thought we had to become her legal guardians. I regret that daily.

What the lawyer who set up the guardianship might have told us is that this legal parenting of our very difficult mother might be for “life,” as in until she died. Seriously, if you’re even thinking of becoming a guardian for an adult, really think that shit over no matter how good your intentions might be.

Our mother has been in and out of what I would call “contact with reality” since emerging from that geriatric rehab program in 2014. We thought we would keep the guardianship “just in case” because she has been in and out of “contact with reality” a few brief times since I was in high school.

We came to regret that decision very much because she has since put us in the double bind of claiming she’s helpless and needs our help when it suits her but at other times — such as last April when she gambled away her rent money on a trip to Nevada — she insists she doesn’t need our help (that is until her rent came due and then she insisted that it was our duty to bail her out).

After that gambling episode last spring, we hired a lawyer to help us dissolve the guardianship because it seemed to not be working for any of us. But the law in Utah is either murky or our lawyer has gone back and forth about whether or not we can, in fact, rescind guardianship of our mother, even if all parties want to dissolve what has become a nightmare for all of us.

We have had two dates for court hearings come and go, they just didn’t happen, because the lawyer said the judge changed his tune about whether or not we needed a doctor’s letter stating our mother is competent in order for the court to dissolve the guardianship. Our lawyer also doesn’t seem to know if it’s possible to — if she’s not competent — to get the court to release us from the obligation and appoint another guardian.

We got the guardianship with the best of intentions. We wanted to help our mother, to be there for her in the way that she — sometimes — was there for us when we were small. She has been an unpredictable parent all of our lives. She can be kind and she can be cruel by turns. It’s the unpredictability that makes it torture. We are sick of being tortured by her and we want to be free.

Watching those court dates come and go, those days on which we thought we might be freed, while our mother rages at us that she doesn’t need our help, never wanted our help, wait, really needs our help, no, no she doesn’t…it has felt like a kind of war, like a kind of prison.

I definitely have thought back on how, in Good to Great, Jim Collins describes interviewing Stockdale about who didn’t survive in a Vietnamese POW camp. This was Stockdale’s reply:

“Oh, that’s easy, the optimists. Oh, they were the ones who said, ‘We’re going to be out by Christmas.’ And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go. Then they’d say, ‘We’re going to be out by Easter.’ And Easter would come, and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. And they died of a broken heart.” ~ Admiral Stockdale