Sharon Pywell

EVERYTHING AFTER is the story of a blended family whose individual members, though they've lived together their whole lives, still have entirely different histories. To my mind, this is the norm rather than the exception -- though that impression has been shaped, of course, by my own memories.

I grew up with four siblings, and though we lived our lives with the same two parents in the same Cape Cod house on the same street for most of our lives, it was clear to me that embedded inside the family I called my own were several other, less familiar families. The oldest two children in this "family" lived in one socio-economic world, the next two lived in another, and so on -- the result of our dad's changing professional life and a burgeoning economy. The mother I knew -- the one who raised her children in the shadow of WWII and pre-Vatican II Catholicism -- was gone by the time her last child came along. Sixteen years separated the first kid from the last. I was raised in a crowd; my youngest sibling grew up as an only child.

Still, differences in the ways our parents parented us and the varying size of the family cash flow can not explain the fact that when my siblings and I "remember" some event in our shared past, we find that no two memories seem to match; at best, they dovetail. We are the most intimate of people -- members of the same biological family. Yet we are mysteries to one another, raised side-by-side but somehow not actually touching. Loving one another does not make this situation vanish.

Of course this Chinese-box view of families shaped the Sunnarets as I worked with them. When dramatic shifts re-direct this family's life, its members' varying ages and natures offer each of them entirely different experiences of the same events. This would be merely academically interesting if they didn't love one another so deeply -- and so find themselves struggling to maintain trust and intimacy at a time when history ripped families to shreds.

I refer to the Vietnam years. I am just young enough to have been able to ignore it while it was happening. My cohort wasn't drafted. It was easy for me to turn off the news when the black bags were shown coming off the airplanes, to miss every demonstration and speech, to pretend it didn't have anything to do with me.

But of course it did. My simplistic and anxious response to what was happening around me didn't shut it out. Just as WWII was the defining historical event in my parents' lives, so Vietnam was the defining event in my own generation. It influenced who I am, and because of that, it influences how I parent my own child. Thus, it shapes her too, though she doesn't know that yet.

EVERYTHING AFTER wasn't so much filling in the blanks of my own past as offering them to people I love who live right by my side, but at a distance I can't necessarily gauge. What will be remembered, I can't say.