Dear Eric: My brother and his family are born-again Christian. I stayed with him in his hometown for about a week while I was having surgery to remove my prostate.
After the stay, my brother told me that I was no longer invited to his home because my atheism made them uncomfortable, but we could always meet at a café.
I don’t wear my atheism on my sleeve, but he did attempt to convert me. No big deal to me.
I am back in the same town for a month of radiation treatment. They asked if I needed anything, like meals prepared, and I declined.
My wife and several of his children want me to attempt reconciliation, but my exclusion from his home as an inferior person is a showstopper.
— Unwelcome Visitor
Dear Visitor: I’ll refrain from expounding on the many Bible verses specifically about welcoming people into one’s home. It is easier for a camel to get through the eye of a needle than it is to define the “right” way for a person to practice their faith.
I wish I had more information about what prompted your brother’s discomfort. Was it simply that you didn’t accept his evangelizing? I’m curious about whether you’re in active conflict or if he’s simply a “my way or the highway” type.
Reconciliation isn’t fully your responsibility here, though. Radiation can be grueling. I can’t imagine sending a family member back to an empty hotel room, even if I did pack them a bag lunch.
For now, focus on your health and peace of mind. But when you’re feeling up to it, break bread at a café and see if you can find common ground.
Dear Eric: For almost as long as my husband and I have been married, close to 40 years, we have had a wonderful friendship with another couple, also a married man and woman.
However, in the past four years or so, the wife has asked me, “What’s up with you? What have you been doing today?” I read between the lines that she thinks I am possibly doing something involving her husband.
In the course of the conversation or text she finally mentions that her husband is not at home. I honestly believe that she is writing down what I normally do on different days of the week and checking up on me.
Never in the span of nearly 40 years has there been anything but a friendship between me and her husband.
Now I find myself volunteering what I am doing like a child explaining to their mother. She also wants me to be in an Apple thing where you know where your friends are at all times.
One of her closest friends did have a husband that cheated on her and that friend may be casting doubts her way and not helping the situation.
— Innocent Friend
Dear Innocent: Who has the time for all this detective work? Time to tell Agatha Christie to step away from the typewriter.
Point out the tendency you’ve noticed. You can do it in a friendly way. “It seems like you’re asking about my schedule a lot lately. Is there something behind that? Would you like to spend more time together?”
Perhaps she’s just lonely or bored. Maybe she actually does think there’s something going on between you and her husband. But your imagination is going to run wild just like hers is until you actually talk.
You’ve been friends for 40 years. There is, one hopes, enough goodwill built up between the two of you that you can have a non-accusatory conversation and clear up any confusion on both your parts. If it’s going well, don’t be afraid to be direct.
Sometimes in life you just have to say, “Susan, I am not sleeping with your husband.”
Dear Eric: You received a letter from a lifelong diarist and you gave her some good
suggestions regarding what she might want to do with her lifelong volumes of personal diaries.
Another suggestion would be to contact Radcliffe’s Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America. Housed in a special collection at the Harvard Library, the “Schlesinger is considered the leading center for scholarship on the history of women in the United States.”
If accepted, the diarist would find her pages archived among those of the great women in American history, including Susan B. Anthony, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Amelia Earhart and Helen Keller.
An added advantage to giving her diaries to an academic library is that, if there is potentially embarrassing material in her diaries, she could ask that they not be released until after the death of her husband, if she predeceases him.
Support Herstory!
— A History-loving Reader
Dear Reader: A number of people wrote in about the Schlesinger Library! A wonderful suggestion. Thank you!
(Send questions to R. Eric Thomas at eric@askingeric.com or P.O. Box 22474, Philadelphia, PA 19110. Follow him on Instagram and sign up for his weekly newsletter at rericthomas.com.)