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The title of my article merges the saying, “Blood is thicker than water,” with the title of a novel by Milan Kundera and the film based on it, called The Unbearable Lightness of Being. I used the latter because it could be adapted to any of the myriad unbearables of human experience, and the former because it emphasizes the implacable bonds of family at the same time as it refers literally to what is often shed by violence. These themes coalesce in the case that I am about to describe.
The patient in question is a thirty-year-old emergency medical technician, the youngest of three sons. His parents are Italian immigrants who, although they have lived in the United States for forty years, return periodically to visit their siblings and extended family near a small city in Abruzzi, where the ancestral home and lands are owned by the patient's uncle (his father's older brother) by the law of primogeniture. The prospects of material success for unpropertied youth in that region of Italy when the father attained his majority were considered poor; for this reason, he immigrated to the United States where there seemed to be no limits on self-betterment. Nevertheless, he has harbored a latent bitterness against his brother that tends to rise to the surface in the form of taunts and none-too-gentle reproaches when disinhibited by the several glasses of good Abruzzi wine that are inevitably taken by the brothers during the visits to the old country. In a recent session, the patient described how his mother admonished his father against drinking with his brother prior to leaving on one of their periodic trips. The older brother was described as a quiet, almost timid man and the patient's father as belligerent under the influence of alcohol.