For the Clarity
Note and Disclaimer: This is a tribute to David Ogden Stiers. Nothing else can be owned. Enjoy!
Some days, even I doubt someone. There will be years where they remain the same person and never change. But when a catastrophic event transforms their life, I can either pity or applaud them. In most cases, it makes or breaks them. In the case of Charles Emerson Winchester III, I can do both.
I mean, Charles was just another blueblood Boston snob. There wasn't anything special about his sad little life. He breezed through it without thinking about the consequences of his actions. He thought that, because his family was rich and powerful, he could get away with anything.
On the outside at least, he lacked compassion, kindness and empathy. He also did not have the same care, love and respect most children had and never had true parents. They were biologically related, distant caricatures that he saw at the dinner table once a day and only to yell at his mistakes. His everyday needs were tended to my tutors and servants, who pampered his every whim.
His relationship with his brother and sister was more real. Honoria was a rebel. She was always running away with some man, only to be carted back and rehabilitated into the family's values time and again. Timmy was sickly and spent most of his life in bed. Charles and Honoria spared him from their parents' wrath. Nobody was going to mess with Timmy, especially when they were around.
It was the only true time Charles would feel love towards anyone. When Timmy died a few years later, he hid his feelings in his little black heart and locked it away in the storm that followed. Even for Honoria, he spared no brotherly love. At Timmy's funeral, he shunned her. He was as cold as winter and could no longer love another.
However, what Charles afterward sought was clarity. He wanted a way to see the world through different eyes. He knew that his lot in life was to stick with the values instilled in him, to use his influence to squash those beneath him and to keep the money within the family. But in his mind, beneath that frozen tundra, those wheels turned another way. They kept searching for some sort of clearing in the thick clouds.
After Timmy's death, he knew that his parents were wrong and he had to change somehow. It wasn't the time to admit it though. He wasn't ready to. Charles was knee-deep in their lifestyle that he could not break away. It wasn't until he was denied Chief of Thoracic Surgery at Boston General that he thought his life had made an unfair turn. But that was also because he was drafted.
Because of his experience in the medical field and his proud nature, Charles was promoted over many doctors to the rank of major. He was pleased of course. His parents did not particularly care for it though. They thought the tenure an unjust one and wrote to their influential friends to keep Charles away from the action and to keep his time short. The closest they managed was stationing Charles at Tokyo General until the war's end.
It wasn't enough. By the summer of 1952, Charles was transferred to the 4077th M*A*S*H in Korea. There was nothing that dearest Mum and Dad could do. His fate was set in stone. It wasn't Colonel Potter that made it happen. The war was suffering from a shortage of doctors. Too many had already gone home and the Army was running out of ideas of how to keep them there.
Unwarranted and unreasonable? I'd believe so too. Charles' talents were wasted in that OR. But he was needed nonetheless. He worked his heart out, ego and all, and urged others to bow down before him. He impressed many and annoyed others. However, during the long year he was stationed in Korea, Charles discovered the one thing that would hold him down – clarity.
In a place like Korea, one's perspective changes quickly. Throughout that long year, Charles may have kept up with the lifestyle of a blueblood, but his heart bled. He learned how music mellowed and shattered him, especially after the death of the Chinese musicians. He understood how death grabs one and not another. He grasped that the universe did not evolve around money and power, but in human spirit and compassion. Clarity had come and anchored him even as he was flying home to Boston. He would forever hold onto a clear vision of the future.
After his war, Charles managed well in thoracic surgery. Clarity of his role had assisted him. He also recalled Korea and decided to quietly help those affected by the war. Widows were one. Orphans were another. It all helped Charles gain the clarity he sought. It also isolated him from his family.
Nobody comprehended the changes in Charles. The closest was Honoria, who realized that his heart had melted. He was finally standing beside her. He was the brother she wished him to be and applauded the way he finally found his clarity. However, it did not mean that the family feuds ceased. It meant that good old Mum and Dad tried excluding them both from the family fortune via legal means. They always failed.
I am Death though…and there is always a way to me. Charles was a pompous jackass who thought himself a demigod of some sort. Only the afterlife had kept him from completely forgetting that he was a human whose grave size was the same as everyone else's. Korea broke him and peeled back a shell that revealed the true Charles. With the rain out of his eyes, Charles can sort of live happily ever after.