The revelation caused a strain on my family and made people start thinking and talking about the past in a way that felt like invasive observation. But, what did I expect to happen? People always persecute the victim first and then support them after things have been undeniably proven. These allegations were difficult to prove. The corroboration of evidence was from the mind of a 6, 7, and 8-year-old child. This child had mastered disassociation to the point of completely blocking these events from her child mind in order to survive.
To this day, though, my greatest fear and regret was that these revelations somehow affected my brother in a deep way and influenced his decision to exit this world. It did create the first ever rift between us. My brother and I had always been extremely close. He had always been my protector, my support system, and my family tie. Without him in my life, I felt like an orphan, disconnected from the world with no one who cared for me.
Revealing those memories to the family, to him, had been one of the hardest things I had ever done and losing him in the process had been heartbreaking. Nothing had ever come between us in this way. It was the dagger that tore our relationship apart. He hadn’t spoken the words to me, but his actions spoke louder than any words ever could. He was cold and distant. He had never been that way with me. You see, my brother had this unrealistic image of my father in his mind. He struggled his entire life with the fact that our father never paid any attention to him, that he was jealous of him in so many ways, and that his envy clouded his judgement preventing him from being the father my brother deserved.
My brother placed our father on a pedestal and when those allegations
came out and weren’t truly denied, it left a lingering stench in the air that my brother couldn’t bear. He had trouble reconciling those thoughts and even though I knew he loved me, I knew he loved our father just as much and was finding it hard to live on both sides. So, I allowed him the time to reflect and ponder, gave him the space that I thought he needed. I thought we would have the time to return to one another. I never thought that this was how our story would end.
My brother and I never did get a chance to repair and mend our relationship before he committed suicide that fateful October 31st of 1996. The guilt that I felt for potentially contributing to his demise was all consuming for almost 18 years of my life.
When I arrived at the funeral home where his body was being exposed, I remember entering the room where his casket was. Everything around me played out in slow motion. I was experiencing another one of those mental breaks where your brain can’t seem to accept what your eyes see. My father was standing at the foot of Walter’s casket talking to one of his brothers. He was talking about his latest plastic surgery he had just had recently to improve his facial features. You see, my dad was an extremely vain man, and he felt the need to share his plastic surgery exploits with everyone that would listen.
I remember looking at him with complete disgust and a hatred that had reached epic proportions in my heart. I avoided him and instead directed myself toward the casket and knelt beside Walter. He looked so peaceful. His little hair spiked up as he always wore it, his skin had this unusual waxy sheen, and his lips had an unnatural color to them making him look like one of those department store mannequins.
I remember kissing his cheek, his forehead, his hands…all of them cold
and stiff. There no longer was life in that body. My brother’s spirit, although in the room, was no longer within the confines of that physical body. I wanted everyone to leave. I hated having people there gawking at him, talking about how well they knew him, and my dad, having everyone around him consoling him as if he hadn’t been part of putting him there. My dad tried to approach me a few times, but the hate filled stare I gave him at those times kept him away.
The funeral day was excruciating. It brought a pain I had never experienced before or since. Watching my brother’s casket being lowered into the ground is still something that I feel is the most surreal event I have ever witnessed.
Months later, I found out that my brother had called my father the day of his suicide. My dad was in a meeting and was annoyed at the disruption. My brother was crying during the call and all my father did to comfort him was to tell him to get a grip and that he would call him later. My brother then called his girlfriend of 17 years, who he had been living with at the time, and basically broke down. No one called us to tell us to go check on him. I was literally 20 minutes from his house and so were my other two sisters. One of us, if called, could have easily rushed to him and saved his life. But that call never came. It was as if he knew who to call to ensure his end would come, that they wouldn’t do anything to stop him.
To this day, I hold them both equally responsible for my only brother’s death, which, I strongly believe, they could have prevented.
My story of a broken childhood, an alcoholic and abusive father isn’t unique or uncommon. Hundreds of thousands of people have had the very same experience as I have so why I am telling this story? It isn’t to blame anyone or to point fingers or to label myself as a victim. On the contrary, it is to ensure that people who read this book know that I have empathy for their passage through similar grounds, and that I understand how they feel.
I believe that you inherit certain behaviors and thoughts through DNA, but I also strongly believe that how you develop as an adult has an awful lot to do with how you were brought up as a child. The nurturing factor of having two loving parents who instill love, respect, compassion, empathy, support, etc. within their child’s environment certainly improves their chances of being well-balanced individuals.
On the other hand, growing up in a home where adults you looked up to subjected you to their emotional unravelling, their aggressive physical abuse, their inadequate insecurities and inappropriate beliefs and behaviours, can most certainly have an influence on how you will imprint these experiences within your psyche. The illogical fears, the festering anxiety, the inherited beliefs of failure, doom, and unlovability can become something the child recognizes as “normal”. They will then seek to reproduce those same environments in adulthood in order to recreate what they’ve come to understand as “normal”.
I know a lot of people who have had the childhood experiences that I have had. The differences between myself and them is a fundamental need to retake control of my own existence. What happens, in a lot of these cases, is that these kids grow up to either become bullies themselves or perpetual victims. They take no accountability for their adult choices and place all the blame on their parents and negative upbringing.
I didn’t do that. I refused to become either a bully or a victim. What I did do was to start working on myself as my own unique life project. I decided that it wasn’t useful to try and change the world. What I needed to do was change myself. Yes, I had no control over what had happened in my childhood. Yes, it was pretty shitty to conclude that the people who should have protected and nurtured me as a child chose not to do so or were not equipped to do so. But, as an adult, it was now up to me to make my own choices, to nurture my own inner core, to let go of the past transgressions, and to try and observe, without emotion to cloud my judgement, the events of my past as an adult.
What I want is for you to identify with the tragedy but then to grasp, which I think is the most important part here, that YOU hold the key to your future. You and your choices will dictate what comes next in your life.
I can tell you that it took me a long, long time to reconcile myself with my past and with all the things I had experienced as a child. I have not forgotten, and I have not forgiven. I don’t believe that you can truly forgive these types of things. I know it’s the charitable thing to do, but I don’t feel I would be truthful with you if I said I forgave my father for everything he’s done. This book, well, it’s all about truth. My truth.
