Grieving

From Cec: Roger sent me a personal email and, with his permission, I'm posting this. It's probably the saddest story I've read. It's hard for me to realize how much some males suffered.

I am reading your book, Not Quite Healed. So much of it reads like my life. That said, the chapter on grieving really tore me up. As I read it, I realized that I'd never grieved what happened to me and the subsequent effects and their impact on my life.

It wasn't just the molestation. That in itself was bad and went on for decades. It wasn't just the lies I was told, or came to believe, or even those I told myself. It was also the person of my father.

He was a Bible-thumping, legalistic, fire-and-brimstone preacher, teacher, evangelist and pastor—the essence of God incarnate to me. I believed every word he preached. When his words didn't add up in his actions, it caused great confusion in my immature young mind. I felt betrayed not only by him, but by God Himself.

For decades I lived full of contradictions and conflict and in dreaded fear that I would turn out like him. I was a man of two minds and very unstable. Then he had the nerve to die and leave me that way.

And not just die, he had to get himself caught with another child relative. In his fear and despair, he killed my mother in her sleep then took his own life, leaving me a note and the mess to deal with.

In having to deal with everything, I had to keep it together and get things done because everyone else, except my wife, was a basket case. I had no time to grieve. For the next two years, I blamed myself for not saying something sooner, not warning people sooner, not confronting him, and for not saving my mother's life.

Even now I sit here writing this with no emotion. My irritability, anger, rage—all inappropriate to the circumstances I see now as evidence that I have not dealt with this. For years, I didn't understand why I couldn't control my anger. Now I see that I can't go on like this. I need to process all the pain that I have suppressed.