“Must I at length the Sword of Justice draw? Oh curst Effects of necessary Law! How ill my Fear they by my Mercy scan, Beware the Fury of a Patient Man.” —John Dryden
For years, I have been patient. “Calm, cool and collected”, as a departing friend at a state hospital once described as what he would remember most about me. Even in a madhouse filled with pedophiles, felons, psychopaths and the broken, I did my best to keep that part of my core self intact. I had the fight of my life doing it.
I wanted to break the madmen in half. I wanted to give victims the justice they deserved from the felons, who had escaped a stay in prison to come here. I wanted to drag the pedophiles into the woods, torture them, castrate them, then string them up and bleed them like a slain deer.
But I never did.
Growing up around truckers who would get furious over the slightest thing, having a father who worried more about outward appearance than the mental health of his own children, beating them bloody by flogging with a 50s-style thin leather belt in secret, I learned what a horrible thing true anger was. My lesson should have been to vent my own anger freely with all possible violence.
But that is not what I learned at all.
What happened to or in front of me terrified me, showing instead what evil looked like, and not the kind you see in movies, but true evil. As in, satanic, demonic and in every opposition to God’s will kind of evil.
Be kind to those who hurt you and spitefully use you. Do good things for others whom you don’t even know. Love, without condition, those who declare or show themselves to be your enemies.
These are things I retained from my life outside of school and my father’s business and home life. A dual life I had no way of understanding. By circumstance, a dual life forced on me by a man who wanted to appear to be a Christian, but, in secret, raped and whipped his children. Sometimes I felt I would go, or had gone, insane under his fucking rage and depravity. Aware that no child should ever have to endure what I and my siblings did, I felt but concealed and contained my rage, believing that, on the most basic level, abandonment (which he often threatened) was far worse than any whipping.
Ralph Leon Smith Sr. was a monster for the ages, yet he was not unique, and far from the worst. I’ve since read accounts of the deeds of both men and women who were in a class by themselves. Human beings who, on the inside, had shed every basic characteristic of humanity and given themselves to madness, power, greed and more.
How could I feel so hurt when compared with what others had endured, often to their dying breath?
The victims of the Holocaust…
I have never been able to reconcile the two. They are aat odds with my living code and sense of self, my soul.
Because even as a child, no matter what I endured, I felt the most outraged at–and for–my sisters.
How I wanted to love them. And how I did love, for so long, siblings who went through what I was sure was more horrible than anything I did.
Because girls were different. Old movies where the scene of a man slapping a woman triggered me. Badly. My father using the belt across my mother’s face fractured my soul and that part of it was lost. Since then, like Lord Voldemort, I’ve dropped many pieces of my soul all across the Eastern seaboard.
Out of all of this, I have one sister left, of four, whom I treasure, love unconditionally, and adore. She’s the youngest, and a special woman who endured too much but faced it with courage and honor, and raised an amazing family of her own. She once told me that after I left the House of Pain, she occupied my room. She sensed me in there, as she described it, as a piece of my soul left behind to protect her. I no longer doubt her.
But things happened with my older sisters. By terrorism and manipulation, our father encouraged snitching on one another. He divided us and put canyons between us that can never be closed. I have no love for my oldest and my next-youngest sisters. For years I pretended to love them. I honestly tried to.
I failed. Say goodbye to another piece of my soul. The failure to love and forgive cost me. It hurt me, but I buried that for a long time. Even that has a price. Terrible as it is, I’ve put paid that one.
As a child, then a teen, I usually spent my anger on myself, but I, being an asshole, could not stop myself from lashing out at neighbors. I destroyed property mostly, causing damages I never had to pay for. Oddly, I knew to pick on those whom I’d have no motive to quarrel with, so suspicion didn’t fall on me. Not once did the police question me. Occasionally I was seen in the act and punished. Not often. All the shit dumped on me had to come out.
With age I was able to reign it in. Then, I began to truly withdraw, avoiding party invitations and eventually dodging weddings and memorial services. I discovered I liked being solitary, closed off. Shut inside and watching movies and playing video games. I especially loved playing video games with my children, like we did with Candyland and Cootie when they were wee ones.
They were the only good things in my life, and then they were gone forever. My soul broke with my heart, leaving me grieving to this day, feeling guilty, as if I failed them, and missing them more every day. I keep expecting the phone to ring, then picking up and hearing, “Hi dad,” and it never happens. The emptiest I’ve ever felt.
My one salvation is my God, what’s left of my family, and 3 very special friends, Maggie, Jane and Kevin. They love unconditionally and constantly. They know my madness and they support me with kindness and understanding. They insist I’m not mad, just broken. And they genuinely want me to be happy.
There’s still the danger, though, of testing my patience. Even I don’t know my limits. Last night as I wrote “The Return of the American Asshole”, I pondered this scary subject.
Dan, the man who would remember me as “calm, cool and collected”, was right. He saw me broken down to my rock-bottom self. I’d hit hard, with 3 botched suicide attempts and possibly some brain damage from pulmonary arrest.
Three heart attacks. Mini strokes including impaired speech. Deep psychological trauma. Children who preceeded me to death. How much was one man supposed to take? I felt like Job.
But though I did question God, I never gave up my faith. And so I lived by my code. Honor, loyalty and love. Protect, defend, forgive. Simple as that, as Jesus taught and I learned, through personal agony…decades of it.
Abuse. Psychological, physical, sexual. They turned me into a monster. A monster I had to control. A monster nobody knew was hidden inside me.
And now that monster roars from within, challenging that control, threatening to break loose and feed its anger again on those I fear. The monster thinks it can protect me, avenge me, but I know that it will only destroy me.
Beware the fury of a patient man, for if you fail, his soul will finish dying when his terrible wrath is unleashed. That wrath will consume all that stands within striking distance of the monster’s awful fangs and claws.
Attempt no contact. Leave me alone, Jennifer. I’m only two steps away from hell. Don’t push me any closer. I’m begging you.
Repost of a 2019 article that I never want forgotten when I’m gone. It is a difficult read, but please do it for me. Please read the linked articles as well, and know that if I die tonight, I’ll go knowing that it wasn’t all in vain, wasn’t useless and that maybe my life really mattered, if only for one brief moment when outrage gave me courage. And that maybe you could use whatever you find here to help others in pain.
This article also sheds light on why I hurt so much for women and children, why The Face In The Window will ever haunt me, from now to my meeting with God. We’re here for such a short time, some of us very short, and everything we do matters. Help others. Be encouraging and unfailingly gentle. Love freely, let compassion fill your heart. It opens you to pain, but the reward is far greater. If you can manage it, you’ll see.
This is one of my oldest posts, and one of the few oldies to still get hits on my Stat page. I hope others have been helped by it. I hope the change in me between then and now is visible, and encouraging. I’m not cured. There’s no such thing, but I have shed some of my bitterness as I’ve looked for God and a faith I thought lost forever. Thank you for caring, sharing and giving me a few moments of your life. You are loved.
WARNING: This article contains material of a disturbing nature and contains mature subject matter. It contains triggers for victims of abuse. Read with care.
OBITUARY
Accidentally, while hunting clues for a cold case murder, I ran across my father’s obituary. I didn’t want to see it.
Nice, isn’t it? Except I never heard once that he was a lawyer. In fact, there’s evidence that he never made it past 7th grade. He did work for B.F. Moffitt, who was successful in legal work with or against the then-feared Interstate Commerce Commission. Moffitt, by all accounts, was an honorable man. Ralph Smith wasn’t. And this obituary boils my blood.
It says, very simply, that he was a lawyer, later owned Comet Fast Freight in Glen Burnie, and he died at age 75 in Salisbury MD in 2002 after a lengthy illness. Fucking vanilla shit. It doesn’t mention that he was one of the worst sex offenders in state history. Not a word.
A decade earlier the same paper said something very different.
Following are several articles from after the trial. Read them, and I’ll tell you something really fucked up.
Jay Apperson was a fine writer and reporter. I knew he was the only spectator in the courtroom during the three-day trial of my parents. We later did things I don’t believe he understood, and that’s what you should expect from a story so horrible; how can he be blamed? But a month after the verdict, when the sentencing hearing came up, reporters from printed media, TV and Radio were there. I particularly remember watching CBS reporter Bruce Morton later on the CBS Evening News with Dan Rather. Mr. Morton was obviously unable to keep a bit of emotion out of his voice. When both Ralph and Betty Smith drew about 99 years apiece for their crimes, the state dropped the remaining cases brought against them for crimes against the rest of my siblings, who I won’t name. It wasn’t fair; they’d taken the time and invested emotionally in writing their police statements and being interviewed first by Detective Jill Klinger of the Sex Crimes Unit of the Anne Arundel County Police Department, then by Assistant State’s Attorney Cynthia Ferris. They got no closure.
But then, neither did I. The trial and my time on the stand was traumatic. And it forced me to feel emotions and speak out loud the unspeakable. It opened up every wound I’d buried. And to this day, those wounds bleed.
As for the 99-year sentences, that was a joke. The judge ordered the terms to be served concurrently; therefore the charges with the most time, 15 years, would be served. They would be eligible for parole in considerably less than that. But they didn’t get their first hearings past the Department of Parole and Probation. Betty Smith served ten years in Jessup Women’s Correctional Facility while Ralph Smith “Esquire” served around eleven. He was in ECI, Eastern Correctional Institution in Queen Anne, after which he wound up in Salisbury, most likely in a halfway house. He died there or in a hospital.
He left behind a shattered family, and all have had their personal struggles. Not being one to compare one person’s pain with that of another, I’ve learned to keep a perspective: all victims of rape, sexual assault, incest and child abuse are, by medical, anecdotal and empiric evidence, walkingwounded. I have seen the evidence for myself. It fucks people up.
NEW YORK
One of my biggest regrets is going to New York and appearing on Phil Donahue’s show. Afterward, I thought it took some of the credibility away from our case. I know Jay Apperson thought so. While there, we were approached by Spectacor Films and offered money for the rights to make a film about us. It was a mistake I was too young and too damaged to understand (Spectacor’s portfolio consisted of feculent films like Amityville 3 or 4). When Mr. Apperson reported it, I thought we’d fucked up. We looked like greedy attention seekers. We were not. We hoped to help other people to stand up to their own abusers. I hoped also to show people in my past why I had been so weird, that it wasn’t my fault. That I was just a messed up kid.
I was happy that I abandoned the book. I was happy the movie contract expired without so much as a draft-script written. When the project was pitched, not a single sponsor would touch it. Too horrible, they said.
Decades later, no one remembers anything of us. We didn’t change a goddamn thing. How I’d dreamed we could. How bitter I was that the world moved on without me. As I grew ever more sick, I went through a divorce. I tried to kill myself. I went through jobs. Then my children died. My whole fucking life was a waste. As if I never mattered, never should have existed. God damn it.
I need no longer speak to my sister. She’s a goddamn Neocon saint whose relationship with the Lord is historic, unprecedented since the death of St. Paul ofTarsus. Piss on her. She judged me and told her friends lies about me. That’s a mistake; I heard about it and now I pretty much think of her as more fucking mental than I am. I didn’t deserve that bullshit. That bridge is burned forever now.
But I feel sorry for her. She’s missed the whole point. Forgotten it. Forgotten her own fucking words to the press. How we could finally be a family.
I don’t like the whitewashed obituary. The man didn’t deserve it.
You see from the articles that the case of the State of Maryland vs. Ralph and Betty Smith was a big deal. The grand jury said the reports read “like a horror story” and the State’s Attorneys office was cited as saying it was the worst case of child abuse they’d seen. The Honorable Judge Raymond Thieme, after it was over, was said to have entered his office, thrown his robe on the floor and stormed from the building. The source said she had never seen him do such a thing.
Sometimes, I think back on that. Even he needed closure, and probably wished he could forget the shit he had to hear.
Ralph Smith had moments when I looked in his eyes. He would take his glasses off, rub his eyes, and for just a second or two, I saw into the soul of a human being trapped in a diseased body. Did I see regret?
No.
Was it guilt?
No.
It was a broken heart.
Then the devil got into him again and the man was gone, replaced by a monster.
And he did not deserve that vanilla obituary.
“VINDICTIVENESS”
Defense attorney Thomas Morrow told reporters: “Even if the charges are true, I can’t understand that level of vindictiveness.”
Holy shit. What a crude thing to say. What a stupid thing to say.
Well it wasn’t vindictiveness at all. Perhaps some desire for vindication was there. But that’s not what started it. I started it.
I was motivated at first because a sister, long lost, called me out of the blue one day. She was in such obvious pain that I knew she couldn’t keep it inside anymore. Some of what happened to her happened to me at the same time. We were made by my parents to watch 8mm porn films, then do things together, and then we split up; my father and my sister alone in another room, my mother taking me into another. We both saw, did and knew things we both had to do, see or otherwise. When she called, she told me about the things I hadn’t witnessed. Things our father had done to her that were so evil, so horrible that I can’t describe even one of them here. As I listened, my heart was aching. Things people should never have to imagine, much less endure, were vividly pictured in my mind. Before the long call ended, I was full of rage. Goddamn it, they had to pay.
I had an immediate plan. I was going to go to Bart’s Sporting Goods on Ritchie Highway, buy a shotgun, drive to Pasadena, kick the door to their house of pain and evil open, and fill my parents with double aught buckshot. But I happened to spot a copy of the Gazette lying on the coffee table and I picked it up and read it. There had to be a reason I was so motivated. Because there was a story about kids from my neighborhood who grew up with us. They had gone through the same type of abuse. They waited until the youngest turned 18 years of age, then went to the police. Their father was arrested, tried and convicted.
I remembered those kids. One very little girl, the youngest as far as I know, a little girl whose face should have been lit up by an innocent smile, showing up at the bus stop with red, swollen, watery eyes. Tears flowing. Her body held in a position I knew caused by physical pain. I can’t get it out of my head; I’d known something was wrong. When I learned why she’d been like that, I regretted that with my own experience, I didn’t see it for what it was. I will always be sorry I didn’t know, couldn’t help, and they were right down the street all those years.
Maybe I didn’t have to commit murder and throw my life away in an act of revenge. Maybe, this family I’d known so little about had done something we could do. As if there was a hand guiding me to read that paper.
SAVING A NEPHEW
A few of us talked. My youngest brother, still living at home, dropped a bomb on me one day: a sister who had gotten divorced and had a toddler son had moved back home. If being a parent is hard, being a single one is really difficult. But that’s no excuse for what my brother told me she did.
It seemed that when the boy cried and wouldn’t go to sleep at night, she would get our father to beat him with his belt.
Goddamn, it’s hard to write this. I wish I didn’t have to. I wish it never happened. But it did.
Suddenly the imperative was to get the boy away from that. It wasn’t about payback. Justice. Revenge. The kid had to be saved before he was so traumatized that he became one of us.
I contacted the boy’s father, living in North Carolina at the time. I told him our story. What was happening to his son. And I said she had two weeks to get him the hell out of there, or something very bad was going to happen. According to my brother, the asshole did call her, but she convinced him that I was quote “full of shit”.
She had thrown down a gauntlet. When my youngest brother turned 18, he moved out. We went to the police and made statements, and that is why and how it all began. I have no remorse; once sentenced, my parents lost the house. They went to prison. The boy was as safe as we could make him. But I’ve never forgotten that my oldest sister was still a monster, and I’ve worried over the years that my nephew never got out of it unharmed.
AFTER
In 2015, I was outside smoking. A warm summer night. A neighbor had a window open. His daughter was screaming and her father yelled, “I’m your father and I can beat you whenever I want.”
Very uncharacteristically, shaking with rage, I finished my cigarette. I went inside and took two Ativan to calm down. I should have called the police. I didn’t.
The knocking on his door pissed him off. He’d been nice to me, always saying hello and smiling. But now I knew what he was. He was my father. Different shell, same demon.
He stepped out onto the porch. I leaned to whisper in his ear.
“I heard you. I know what you just did. The next time I hear it, I will kill you. She’s worth it. I’ll go to jail, but you’ll be sitting on Satan’s lap, you piece of shit.”
He turned. I wasn’t wearing my glasses. I looked right into his eyes. He knew I meant it.
It was a mistake. He moved his family out. I couldn’t help her; I’d probably made it worse.
I have the hope that he was so scared that he sought help. Or he changed.
I believe the hope to be unrealistic.
In the end I wonder what I’ve ever accomplished that was good. It all seems so useless, so futile.
The monsters don’t change.
They can’t. Ralph Smith died a monster. And everyone forgot what he really was. He got a lie for an obituary.
The world forgets.
And I…am an asshole.
Post-Update, Father’s Day, 2022.
The final verdict is in; Ralph Smith never practiced law.
He never finished college. When he was working for the motor truck association, he was a fucking clerk, typing tariffs and doing billing.
I have a cousin named Bonnie, and another named Terri, on Ancestry. Both are hostile toward me and one is responsible for making his ancestry profile make Superman seem like a milquetoast compared to my father. The motive: they’re from the south. Family can be serial killers, but they’d conceal it if they could. I’ve blocked all updates and emails from the site, and I’m never going back. Because fuck the Smith family. Inbred shit beyond the ability to accept truth or to tell it.
Like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, doomed to tell of his thoughtless crime until he died, so here am I; skipping a year only made everything worse.
And, like the wedding guest in his epic poem “The Rhime of the Ancient Mariner” (It is an ancient Mariner, and he stoppeth one of three), I now stop you, dear reader, and grasp you by your arm. You are trapped, bound by fate to read my true story of Christmas, tragedy and loss, and of warnings concerning things not yet come, but which surely will. Sit back, and give me your attention.
It was Christmas Eve, 1994. I was recently separated from my wife, forced out of home, away from my children, Beth, age eleven, and Michael Jr., age seven. It was hard on them as well as myself; we were so close. I packed their lunches, took them to school, picked them up, made snacks and ran and played outside, I helped with homework, and read stories at bed time. You can’t be closer than that. And when you get pulled apart, there’s no pain like it. At least that’s what I thought.
How wrong I was would become clear.
That year, that first year, I did not want to see them for Christmas. I had no money for gifts, not anything at all to even resemble a gift. And so, after years of lighting up Christmas morning with toys, this year I wasn’t going to feel much like a daddy, and certainly not a man. It was cold that night and for some reason, darker than any night I had ever seen in desert or mountains. It could have been my perception, probably was, but my heart was equally dark. Black, lacking any of the sentiment or cheer I had felt when I was with them. I was not going to visit them.
I had an infection in my left eye. I would awake every morning, a Krispy Kreme glaze of white over my eye and eyelid, I’d steam it away, and have to repeat cleaning it several times in a day. I planned to go to the hospital, so after work at Papa John’s, I killed time so that I would get there very late and there wouldn’t be too many people in the Emergency Department waiting room.
Having Christmas tips, (enough that I indulged in a Wendy’s Triple for dinner), a friend told me about how my plan for avoiding my kids on Christmas sucked. He was young when his parents divorced, and he would visit his dad every Christmas. He said, “I didn’t care what he gave me, or if we sat and just watched TV. I just wanted to be with my dad”. That was the first lesson I would get that night.
I arrived at John’s Hopkins Bayview Hospital at eleven or a bit after. The waiting room was stuffed with sick people and, worse, many were children. I felt guilty as I signed in. Told that it would take time to be seen, I went outside to smoke. It was dark there in the parking lot, and this time not merely by my soulless perception. I lit a Winston and a soft but pathetic voice behind me made me jump: “Got a light?”
I could only barely see him, there in the dark. He lit the Bic I handed him, and in its glow, I saw something I have never forgotten: a black man, black as coal, the face being lined and aged as that of one who has been to Hell and only halfway come back. Part of him was still there. I was filled with pity. My fear of him was gone. Here was a man I wanted immediately to hug. I often wish that I had.
“I’m here trying to get committed,” he said, and the sadness poured from every word. Like the Mariner’s wedding guest, I would hear his story; I was helpless to do otherwise.
“I’ve been — I lost my family. I lost everything. I had a wife, two kids, great job, house, two cars, even a boat. One day…”
One day his wife and children were killed in a car accident. Three lives were ended so suddenly that no human on this planet could ever tell him again that God is real, that it was fate, or that any reason under the sun had a part or explanation in or for such a horror.
“I went into the bottle after that,” he said, “and I never came out. I lost my job. Then my boat. Then my car. When the sheriff came to get me out of the house, I swung on him.”
He had lived on the cruel and merciless streets of Baltimore ever since. And aged grievously. Here was a man so beaten down by tragedy that he was not living, but merely surviving. He was so tragic to me that I felt tears in my eyes. A security guard came out and yelled at him to get inside. He was supposed to be on suicide guard, and the guard had let him slip away. And was castigating him for it. Before he turned to leave me, he said the saddest thing of all: “I just want my kids back.”
Well. I never saw him again. Next morning, I called my ex. I said I had nothing to give the kids. I didn’t feel right visiting. She put my daughter on the line. Beth was far wiser and kinder than anyone I’ve ever met. She said, “It’s okay, daddy. Your gift can be that you love us.”
She melted my heart. Standing at a public payphone, I silently wept. And I remembered the two lessons given me the night before.
And so I crossed the Francis Scott Key Bridge, went to visit, and we did lots of hugs and talking and I never again looked back, except Christmas time, when I honored my teachers: a friend who taught me that no gift is equal to a father’s love for his children, nor is their love for him, and one very broken man who pulled his heart out and let me see the ghosts of Christmas Future.
I skipped this story last year, but this year I realized that I never told it for myself.
Because it does no good to me. I learned the lessons and I acted on them.
But that’s not the point of the story. Like the Ancient Mariner, I am bound by honor and fate to retell this shamefully selfish plan I had in 1994. The man whose face was blacker than a New Mexico night taught me about boundless love, unbearable loss, and how he just wished he could have another chance, how he wished his children could have another chance. I could not feel his grief, but he did make me feel guilt.
The story I tell is now identical to his. Although many Christmases and birthdays would pass after 1994, and we made great memories and and went on epic adventures, the times came for me to lose them both. And that is why I’m writing this.
I want you to think about this: you never know how much time you have with any loved one, be they family or friend, and now, especially now in these busy, frightening times, you should always put them first and spend every second you can with them. Because tomorrow, they may not be here anymore, nor ever again to pass our way. You will be heartbroken. Feel guilty. You will cry endlessly. And the holidays. Oh, the holidays! They bring a special pain, one you cannot escape. No amount of alcohol and no drug can deaden it. Can’t even moderate it. Substances merely make everything worse.
You may find yourself even hating this time of year, full of bitterness and unable to see any good in the world.
Beth died in 2012, Michael Junior in 2018. The last time I saw him was Christmas Day 2017. I spent years never being able to control my anger, my grief, my bitterness. When my son died, we had mourned Beth together. When he died, I was dropped into bewildered despair. I went crazy and I went to Hell. I started this blog afterward and tried to give an accounting of myself because I hated myself and I secretly wanted everyone else to hate me, too. I wrote terrible things. What I wrote was always true and as faithful to memory as I trusted them to be.
Now, after trying to reconcile with other family members, and in so doing help them to see that the hurtful things I said after Junior’s death were uttered or written by a man no longer sane, I’ve regained what little bit of honor I had before my children died. An apology when forced is difficult to utter; but one truly meant chokes up the throat and releases tears of guilt you never should have retained at all.
Yes, mental illness does play a part in this tragedy, but so do other things.
Things like remorse, pain, loneliness and emptiness. Regret. Guilt. Ever looking backwards, living the past again and again and again, a prisoner in my own mind.
But it does not do to trap yourself so, holding yourself hostage for terrible things for terrible reasons. You cannot live; you’re merely surviving.
It is far better to live as best you can, and, like I, finally climb a peak where the air is fresh, vision ahead is clear, and to my back there is only the best of what I left behind. The climb stripped me of regret, remorse and guilt. I am not on the highest mountain, but neither am I still in Hell.
I prefer to remember a time when I was younger, and I ran with my children under gray skies and blue, laughing every step of the way. We were so free.
Now, I have faith that they live in Heaven.
Still…this time of year…I do miss them.
And so, my story. And my fated mission. I hold it to be an honorable one: I never told it for me.
Dear friend, I tell it for you.
Every day, tell those you love how you feel. Hug and kiss them when they’re with you. Resist argument and bring the subject up: what if you didn’t have each other? There’s no time for fighting. No tomorrow. Nothing to take for granted. Remember that.
I release you, friend. Go in peace share this post, tell others how loss truly feels. Especially with things left unsaid. Life is like that. It knows how to be cruel.
May the season bring you joy, and a bit of peace. God bless; be well.
Yesterday, I had the most amazing experience: I had dinner with my previously estranged family. Two brothers, the wife of one of them, one nephew and his wife and daughter. Yup. My nephew is about to be a grandfather.
I’m not going to go back and look through the archives of my dead site to find the post where I wrote about them so horribly. Nor am I inclined to go back in this site’s archives to read more mean things I wrote.
I’ve only recently become aware that when I started this blog, I was a different man. In 2018, on Valentine’s Day, my son was found dead. Cause of death: fentanyl overdose. And my daughter was already gone, having drowned in 2012. I knew this call would come. Unlike my daughter’s death, which I never saw coming, I knew my son was doomed, and dreaded getting that one kind of phone call that every parent either does, or should, fear.
For days, I was numb. In shock. And when I finally got round to telling family, I took their lack of response (or the kind that I thought they should have) as uncaring and unsympathetic. I had brushed Death and been delivered by a higher power so many times that I can never count them all, yet both of my children were gone. And maybe I wasn’t the greatest father ever, but I was a dad. After years of blaming myself, I’ve come to realize that their deaths weren’t my fault.
Drugs, disease and loneliness; pain and a broken heart have more ability to steal life than any parent has to save it. I’m sorry for that. The saying that no parent should have to outlive their children is used so much that, until you’ve been there, you cannot know how true it is.
By the fall of 2018, one of our family get-togethers was upon me. I got texts and flipped out. What could I say to such people I loved but imagined didn’t care for what I was going through? And I wrote back some nasty stuff, and told them that they would never see me again.
Then, much later, it came time for me to get exactly how evil I had been. I don’t feel that I was selfish, just….evil. when your heart is broken, what can you do?
After my son was gone, I went crazy.
Then I went to Hell.
Having turned my back on family without giving them the chance to see me in person, to hold me in their arms and cry with me, I had one person left who worked hard to keep me grounded until my sanity came trickling back into my brain. She put up with so much for so long that those phone calls, by my estimate, did more than save my last threads of sanity; they saved my life.
And, perhaps, my soul.
We’ve never met. But she has saved me before. Part of me really wants to believe that she’s an angel.
So the time came for my brother to come to town after COVID-19 had kept him grounded. He said he was going to call my other brother; that made me nervous but hell. It was time. I had to mend at least part of the fence.
But then he added others to the list.
***
Lemme tell you about PTSD and one of its never-discussed symptoms. IBSD, or irritable bowel syndrome with the prevalent and humiliating sudden diarrhea that sometimes, under stress, cannot be held back.
That’s right: you’re not alone. It was hours to go before he would pick me up, but before I could dose myself with Imodium and clonazepam, disaster struck. No warning given. I almost made it to the toilet but hey, don’t be grossed out. I call it “shit happens”. I know, “Shut the fuck up, Mikey,” but it is a part of life for many people and these things should be freely discussed. Especially with doctors. PTSD is an incurable mental illness and this wasn’t my first miss. I’ve had it since childhood. And look: there’s no way to stop every symptom. Not with medication and not with therapy. I just watch what I eat and drink, and before going into a stressful situation, take the above-mentioned drugs.
After showering, it was time.
My big brother and I embraced, years of missing each other keenly felt. I almost cried.
I held that back. I hate crying.
We window-shopped at the mall to kill time, and I’m telling you true, that was good medicine after years of avoiding crowds and people. The smell of new clothes and fresh leather awoke in me a love of people I had never appreciated before. One woman tending a display in a store, a black woman with the most gorgeous hair, caught my eye; I complimented her on it and she gave a startled but pleasant “Thank you!” and that is not something I have been known to do. I’m a different man, and complimenting beautiful women comes naturally now; not in a condescending or solicitous manner but in genuine sincerity. And they know it. My day was made for the second time.
Dinner was awkward for me. I apologized for the things I had said, but I was assured that it had all been understood as soon as I had said it. I was always family and that was it. My nephew knows me, sees me as few others have, and when it was time to part company and we embraced, he whispered, “We’re Smiths. We know how this works. Don’t sweat the small things and take care of yourself. We’ll always understand, and I love you, and I’ve really missed you.”
That’s family. His wife is funny, wise and the picture of beauty and loyalty. His daughter will be due to deliver quite soon, so she suffers things I can’t imagine, and both brothers are plain hilarious, my sister-in-law witty and funny like everyone else. I think my best moment was when my brother was struggling to cut loose a potato skin and I whipped out a switch blade and offered to help. Illegal weapons always light up a party.
Well, that’s it. No names, no pictures; I defend the right to their privacy. I just couldn’t wait to tell you that I’ve actually healed, if just a little, or, at least, changed into a better man than I remember being. And I have my family back. And I’m grateful to God for them, and anxious to see them again, along with a few who weren’t there. Forgiveness from others is magical; Forgiveness of oneself only possible for me because of God. But it, like love, is powerful and sweet.
Memoirs of an American Christian 