The Full Circle of Truth

It’s unnerving, really. To discover things that make your stomach twist about people you thought you knew and people you never met.

How could someone do such a thing?

My grandmother was the kindest person I knew. Which wasn’t saying much, considering the people we both knew. I think this was one of those unsaid things, about the quality of the people we called family. Even if they suck, they’re still family.

If anything happened to anyone, she was the first on her feet and into the kitchen to cook because food helped everything. No matter what, people would need to eat and she was going to make sure there was enough food even if meant sending my grandfather to a store for something he wouldn’t return with. It was just her way to get him out of her kitchen and so we could all stop listening to him complain about feeding the world.

During my teenage years, that today looking back on by-the-way, weren’t all that crazy even in those days, she was the one I’d go to for help. Advice. A breather. Yes, I had the occasional boy trouble, but my grades were good and I wasn’t crossing state lines to drink or get married. I did get suspended for trying to ditch school one day, got caught, was sent to my grandmothers’ house for a weekend of punishment, and missed the biggest camping trip party ever. I bet that weekend I spent playing Yahtzee and the piano with my grandmother saved me a lot of trouble in the long run.

I think about those years now, the things I was taught, the things I was told. The things I was accused of and never did, the things I did and was never caught. The things I tried to tell them, tried to listen to, tried, tried, tried to just feel comfortable in my skin. Maybe the problem was I had big dreams that didn’t conform to what they thought I should do with my life. A life they’re not even around the see. I see now how those years mattered the person I am today.

The problem was their inability to communicate. Did people string sentences like that together in the 70s and 80s? Not in the house I grew up in. 

No, in my world even when really bad things happen the approved method of dealing with it is to not deal with it at all. Not talk about it. Not put it out there for everyone to know. Not make anyone uncomfortable, not even the person who makes everyone else uncomfortable.

Keeping the truth from people makes them a target. Especially if the harm is coming from within the family.

A year ago a cousin found me. She had started digging into her mother’s family, my mother’s family. She didn’t understand why our family was so splintered, why we didn’t keep in touch and do what she thought were normal family things. Why hadn’t we grown up together? Our mothers were cousins, our grandmothers had been the closest of sisters. What split up our family?

If you’re breathing air in 2020, I’m sure you can think of a lot of things that could sever communications for years. Possibly lifetimes. God knows lesser arguments have ended relationships. 

But in the 60s and 70s?

When we connected it was like Christmas. A new cousin who felt more like a sister. Even my mother said the first time she saw her cousin's daughter when she was about a week old, my mom wanted to take the baby and run. “I just felt like she should have been mine.” (My mother had suffered a late-term miscarriage. I can understand the feelings.)

At first, the digging was exciting. We ordered and sent in our DNA tests and waited (and waited and waited) until the science of us went live and started connected us with people from - everywhere. I don’t know how many hours I have spent seeing what % of our DNA and connects me with these people or chasing leaves up a family tree into faraway lands I have begun to dream of. It’s so cool.

In the stories we shared of our childhoods and lives before now, we discovered we had very similar experiences for two people who didn’t grow up together. From the jobs we held to our relationships, our big dreams, and even some pretty dark secrets, it was almost like talking to a mirror. And we look very much alike like our grandmothers did. But they were sisters and we are cousins.

We collected what we could from our mothers, cousins, and family we knew and were meeting for the first time to piece together the stories of our ancestors. I was in the middle of mourning the loss of a friend while learning very little about the people who came before us. Dates of birth. When they got married. The birthdates of any children they might have had. Where and when they died. 

There was very little of the “Dash” part. The story in-between the dates. How do you find their story in dates?

Their Stories. Our Stories.

My friend who died was a writer. She was so funny, I mean seriously funny. Even her proposals to clients about their promotional goods earned her standing ovations in sales meetings. She was working on her stories, a screenplay, and two or three novels, she was trying out a blog and raising to kids on her own who were starting to drive. She was 45 when she died from an Epileptic seizure. 

Without her, there was a void in my life, in the world. I missed talking with her, hearing the stories of her day she could turn into a stand-up routine. I would pee my pants laughing at those stories and now they were gone. Just like anyone else who isn’t here anymore. Her stories are gone.

I can hardly watch an old western, where someone is randomly shot and killed. The first thing I think is ‘what was their story?’ Because if anything about those westerns is true, it was probably the random killing part. 

We take our words with us when we go. 

But even death doesn’t stop the truth from coming to the surface. 

Our eldest living relative is all over Facebook. Like ten times the amount a teenaged influencer might be. She’s got her beef with the world and not afraid to say it. 

The easiest to find, she was ready to tell her stories. Again. Verbatim. Auntie Storyteller had shared what she knew about the family before in emails with my mother. I knew because I had those emails printed out and living in page protectors in the binder where my mother kept all the information she could find when she was looking for family history back in the 2000s. She turned the binder over to me sometime around 2013. 

But what Auntie Storyteller told my cousin over the phone that afternoon rocked us both to the core. 

My cousin and I both had grown up in dysfunctional households and at an early age had been the victims of sexual assault and abuse. Hearing what my grandmother and her sisters experienced at the hands of their father, even writing this now I begin to shake. My heart races. My face tightens, it’s a cross between utter confusion, disgust, sadness, anger. 

We both stuttered and cried and questioned our way through the story. But it really came down to this: They knew what it was like. Why didn’t they stop it when it was happening to us?

The men who made us victims were not our fathers, but they were family. We tried to reason, to give them excuses. It wasn’t their family. They weren’t there. How much could we have told them? What would they believe and what would they want to keep a secret - were they afraid their secret would be told again?

Full Circle

The stories have come to me for a reason. I am a writer, it’s all I’ve ever wanted to be. Writing is the common thread of my life, personal and professional. The rule of writing is to write what you know. This is what I know, so these are the stories I write. 

I’m writing to connect the dots of my life, looking for the truth in my journey. Finding the truth in my grandmother’s story has both helped, and hurt. Knowing she must have hurt for me but could do nothing, I can only imagine her reasons and her pain. 

I do imagine her reasons. All the reasons no one said anything when they saw something. Why it took decades to put an end to what was going on right in front of them. Why they were not able to use their words to fight back. 

And I imagine her pain. I always thought her to be outspoken and strong, and she was. But she was also controlled by the demons she’d been raised by, damaged by and somehow for some sick reason, sworn to protect for the rest of her life.

I know a lot of the answers to these questions too. Economic security, for one. Possibly knowing what it would be like to be on the streets should they leave an abusive home. Ostracized by a family who will stick to the status quo for fear of ending up on the outside too. 

In the end, it was the silence that separated the family. The ways it manifested into other problems that became easier to stay away from than to face and go forward together have continued into four generations now. My daughter knows none of this family and probably never will. 

There is underlying anger to the stories we gather as we talk with cousins, aunts, and uncles. Something that tells me they all feel they were gypped out of some kind of better life than the one they’ve been living. I’ve had that feeling too. Getting them to tell their stories, the ones they really want to tell has been harder. They’re not ready to face the truth or let the truth be faced.

What they don’t understand is if you tell the truth it’s over and done. If you tell a lie it sticks with you forever.

I see it like this; The Truth is God. God is The Truth. If The Truth is knocking on your door, it’s God giving you the chance to own it - it’s like God has shown up with The Truth saying, "remember that thing you needed to do? Well, here it is.” 

If you accept The Truth, the consequences, and all the messy stuff The Truth brings, you move forward. Progress can only be made when The Truth is told.

But if you deny The Truth, you are denying God. And God doesn’t give up so you can expect The Truth and God and probably Karma to come knocking again and again and again, with signs that get harder, harsher and sometimes painful, until you do what you need to do to move forward with your life - accept The Truth and all its messy consequences. 

My grandmother and her sisters are not just sad stories. There are happy memories, I know. I have boxes of photographs with smiling faces, a timeline of lives spent healing from things they never really healed from but tried like hell anyway.

I had to accept the truth of my family's secrets. I had to accept the truth of my own traumas and scars. This is my path. I am a writer. It’s my job to tell their stories. And mine.

Secrets and all.