My song today is ‘The Older I Get’. This song is the fourth single released by the Christian rock band ‘Skillet’ from their sixth album ‘Comatose’ in 2007. The song charted at Number 27 on the USK ‘Mainstream Rock Tracks’ and Number 14 on the Billboard ‘US Hot Christian Songs’ chart.
R&R Magazine counted it as the Number 19 most-played song in 2008 for ‘Christian Contemporary Hit Radio’ (CHR).
Skillet's lead singer and primary songwriter John L. Cooper explained the meaning of the song in the following words: "The song is about my relationship with my Dad and feeling that I had been betrayed by him, and all these bad feelings going on. In the end, it came down to 'forgiveness'. When I forgave my dad, 'real healing' came back into my life and the song ‘The Older I Get’ was about that and saying I wish I could go back and do it all over again. If I could, I would probably make that step earlier towards forgiving him because my life got so much better when I did."
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This song’s message addresses the time of life as we get older. At this time of our lives there is a greater incentive to regret past wrongs in the autumn of our days, and where possible, to try and make amends, if possible. All families have their ‘falling outs’ and ‘quiet periods’ from time to time. It is part of human nature that occasionally one person’s actions, statements, or professed beliefs will come into pronounced conflict with one or other family members. When this occurs, there is usually a ‘cooling-off’ period between the main protagonists. However, when one person has deeply offended their entire family, the ‘fall out’ effect can remain for a long time. When this occurs, the family rift can cut so deep that a chasm has grown which is difficult, and sometimes impossible to be bridged. Not often, but it does happen!
When I was a Probation Officer in Huddersfield, I will never forget one man with whom I worked. He was in his early 60s, and he and his twin brother continued to live in their farm-house dwelling after their father had died. There were no other siblings. Both parents were deceased, and the last parent to die was their father ten years earlier. Shortly after their father’s death, both brothers fell out and stopped talking to one another. Their protracted silence was to last over ten years. The brother with whom I worked had been placed on Probation Supervision for cruelty to a dog, with a condition that he also saw a psychiatrist.
The offence was not as cruel as it might appear initially. The working dog, which had faithfully served the old farmer for six years appeared to pine the loss of its master (the twin-brothers’ father) for many months after the passing of the old farmer. Shortly after, their father’s death the twin brothers fell out and stopped talking to each other. Over the following ten years, although the dog still lived on the farm, it was now approaching its 16th year of life and had started to get several ailments in its back and hindquarters. The dog no longer ran and walked painfully slow. Initially, the brother who had been the closest to his father thought that time might improve the walking condition of his father’s dog, but sadly it did not.
It eventually transpired that the other brother (the one who’d had the closest relationship with their mother) could not bear to be near the farm dog or to see it in pain. Every time he looked into the dog's eyes, he got it into his head that he was looking at his father again, or as he described it to me, ‘that his father was looking back at him from the grave through the eyes of the dog’. He genuinely felt that his father’s dog had assumed his father’s spirit when the old man died. One day, he could take it no longer, and so he led the dog out to a nearby field where he shot the dog and buried it.
The sentencing magistrates ordered both a ‘Social Enquiry Report’ from the Probation Service (which I prepared), and the court also requested a ‘Psychiatric Report’. The defendant told me during my first interview with him that the dog was in obvious pain, just like his father had been after contracting cancer of the stomach; a condition that eventually killed him. He told me that seeing the dog in obvious pain and distress was no different than seeing his father in pain. Whenever he looked at the dog and saw its pitiful eyes, it was as though the dog was pleading with him to be put out of its misery. He added that his father had wanted to end his life earlier when the pain of his stomach cancer got worse but he knew that if he asked his favourite son, he would refuse, so instead he asked his brother as he lay dying to overdose him. The Probation client knew such an act would have been merciful, he could not bring himself to overdose his father. Consequently, when he saw his father’s dog in pain during the creature’s advancing years, he viewed the shooting of his father’s dog as being no less an act as a ‘mercy killing’; something which any compassionate vet would do.
When the sentencing magistrate was able to assess the humane aspect of the deed, rather than viewing it as representing inhumane cruelty to a dumb animal, and once the court had also learned of the silence between the twin bothers which had endured without interruption for the previous decade (as detailed in my ‘Social Inquiry Report’ for court), it could see that the brothers might benefit from the assistance of a compulsory mediator; namely myself, as well as the defendant having contact with a psychiatrist who might be able to offer suitable treatment.
Subsequently, a two-year Probation Order with a one-year condition of Psychiatric Treatment was ordered by the court. The defendant was described as having a ‘personality disorder’ that was treatable. What that meant in layman terms was that the psychiatrist had not the faintest idea what was up with the man but knew that his behaviour of maintaining a ten-year silence with his twin brother was odd enough to capture him under this umbrella ‘catch-all’ phrase of ‘personality disorder’; a condition which could not be medically proven to exist, or even if it did, prove amenable to treatment.
My entire period of supervisory contact was maintained through home visits to the farm at Kirkburton, Huddersfield. There were very few office visits arranged as I also needed to see and speak with my client’s twin brother whenever it was possible to do so and being farmers who worked from dawn to dusk, most of their day was spent working apart somewhere on the farm. I eventually learned that while both brothers had not talked for ten years, the longer their silence went on, the easier they found it to maintain. One twin brother had originally refused to talk to the other brother until he had apologised for whatever perceived wrong he had done, and both brothers being proud, became determined not to be the first one to break the silence. In fact, it eventually transpired that neither brother could recall what was the precise cause that they had initially rowed and fallen out about!
Over their decade of continuous silence, they each managed to perform their designated farm tasks, and also avoid each other in different parts of the large farmhouse and its land all day and all night long. They dined at the same kitchen table, but never at the same time, and they avoided using the same washing, bathing, and toilet facilities. They shopped separately, and generally managed to live in the same farmhouse, but always apart. Both brothers were of single status and had never married, nor seemed inclined ever to do so.
It took me about one year, and many failed attempts, before I managed to persuade both brothers to sit down in the same room. For months, the twin brother who was not the Probation client refused to say a word to me, even though he listened (at a distance) to whatever I had to say to him or his brother. Stage two involved his brother (the probation client) talking to me about his brother. As his brother would not speak to me during my earlier farmhouse visits and tell me about himself, I invited the Probation client to tell me about his brother, who was sitting nearby listening. This strategy worked, and whenever the brother did not agree with what was being said about him by the other brother, after a few disagreeable grunts and groans, he too started talking to his brother and about his brother ‘through me’. This involved lots of “Tell my brother that…” and “That’s a downright lie what he says!” statements back and forth.
We were about six months down the line, before both brothers who had started talking about each other ‘through me’, eventually started talking to the other brother directly as though I was not present in the room. They spoke about each other in accusatory and uncharitable terms, and it soon became evident that each brother felt they had been loved by only one of their parents, and merely tolerated by the other parent. One brother believed that during his childhood and development that his mother favoured his twin brother, while the other brother (the Probation client) felt that their father favoured the other son. Both brothers had seemingly grown up believing that either mum or dad did not really love them, and would have been happier if only one of the twins had been born.
I eventually concluded (rightly or wrongly) that after the death of each parent, both brothers found the bereavement process difficult to negotiate. The son who was closest to the deceased parent felt they were grieving the loss of their parent alone, while the other brother simply appeared to be getting on with his life as though it had been a stranger who had died instead of their mother or father. I concluded that each brother had been in denial as to the loss of one parent and that the protracted silence between both brothers simply intensified the grieving process of the closest son. I believed that both brothers were in effect still grieving the loss of each parent in their own way. I also hypothesised that my client had undergone some kind of mental /emotional breakdown, and it was during this stage when he started imagining things about the spirit of his father continuing to live in the dog he left behind whenever the dog looked at him with its doleful eyes. After he had shot his father’s dog, his twin brother (the one who had been the closest to his father) indicated that the shooting of the dog was as if his father had died all over again.
And that was why his twin brother reported the killing of the dog to the R.S.P.C.A. behind his brother’s back! After the R.S.P.C.A. had made a farm visit to investigate the cruelty allegation ‘on an anonymous tip-off’, they pressed for the prosecution of the brother who had shot the dog.
I would like to say that the twin brothers eventually reconciled to become normal loving brothers but cannot. I considered that managing to break their silence represented significant progress, but they still remained too emotionally distanced to ever be close again (that is if they ever were close in the first instant?) I recall hearing about the death of one of them about ten years after my involvement, but which brother, I do not know. Neither do I know if the feuding brothers ever made up their differences, although I suspect that too much bitterness had flowed between them for too many years, and too much water had passed beneath the bridge to forgive and forget.
Love and peace Bill xxx