Invisible Lessons

Invisible Lessons
Thursday, April 18, 2019 by Debby Dever

Invisible Lessons

Watching the scene from “To Walk Invisible: The Brontë Sisters,” where the red-headed prodigal son comes home, hit way too close to home.

Addiction is not a new thing. This was 1846, the story of the famous crazy-talented writers the Brontë Sisters, daughters of an English parson, their equally talented brother Branwell, and how his addictions affected all their lives. Addiction happened even centuries before that.

Always there is the eternally optimistic and sometimes enabling family member (in this case the father), who is in denial and always finds someone else to blame. There is a family member like the oldest sister Charlotte who becomes the family rock, numbing herself to feeling and realizing that if the brother doesn’t want to change, change will never occur. There’s the strong supportive person, like Emily, who is closest to the addict, and the angriest because she loves him so much. And there’s the weak, kind soul like Anne who blames herself and tries to figure out where she went wrong...how she could have behaved differently and maybe this wouldn’t have happened.

I think I’ve been all of these people at one time or another. I guess we go through stages of endurance and just plain surviving ourselves when dealing with a loved one who is going through this...putting their family through it.
In this family’s experience, there was a lot of tragedy (Branwell dies a terrible death soon after this scene, age 31; Emily dies 2 months later of tuberculosis caused by a chill she caught at her brother’s funeral, no doubt compounded by grief, age 30; Anne dies a few months after that from tuberculosis caught while nursing her sister, age 29; and Charlotte remains the only surviving sister—two elder sisters had died much earlier of TB at boarding school—the mother had died after giving birth to her sixth child in six years).

The untimely deaths of Emily and Anne came one year after the publication of the incredible novels they wrote. If you only focus on how amazing their writing was, and how unfair it seems that they would not live to share more of their genius with the world, or have any idea of their success, the whole of it all seems nothing but tragic.

But in the midst of all this tragedy, I started to look for some silver lining...for some trace of “God works all things together for good.” This can be found in the realization that if those sisters had been blessed with a strong, moral, financially supportive brother, the chances of them banding together and joining forces to share their literature with the world may never have happened at all. The time and effort and dedication and faith it took for them to mail hand-written copies of their works to publishers, always fearing they’d be discovered to be women and rejected. They did it not for fame or recognition (all their work was published originally under the pseudonyms Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell), but because they realized they had no other means of supporting themselves when their brother and father were gone. Without this motivation, the world might never have known them.

God can bring good things out of even the most hopeless-looking situations, if we take the time to look at all the angles and possibilities.

Debby Dever, 56, lives in Ashland, Ohio. She is employed with Sonoco-Trident as a quality control/proofreader. Previously she worked for 30 years splitting her time between typesetting/graphic design at a print shop and teaching graphic design and photography to high school students at a career center. She assists writing-group friends in editing and self-publishing their books. Her writing and poetry have been self-published in The Language of Nature 2004 compilation, Reflections newsletter, and an Advent compilation. She has had contributions published in the “Platforms of Yore” (Writer’s Digest April/May 2017 and September 2017). She is currently working on a book of poetry (Wanderings), and a devotional for teens based on classic literature (the Skinny on the Classics). Recently she has been trying her hand at fiction, and placed in the top 5 in the Writer’s Digest “Your Story #91” writing contest. Debby is a member of the Northeast Ohio Word Weavers group and National Songwriters Association International (Cleveland/Akron). Visit her blog at alittlegoodmuse.wordpress.com.