Growing up I was told fairytales about my paternal Grandparents. Most of which came from the extended family of my Grandfather. The heroes and villains were very clearly painted. In some versions, my father was one of those villains. Grandpa was the varsity athlete who held state records and went to the Olympic trials. He was a WWII vet and an all American hero. A good Catholic man, who could do no wrong. Grandma was the scandalous evil queen who’s affair took away his fairytale ending.

As the story goes (I would later come to find it was a total work of fiction, but we will get back to that), my heroic Grandpa was in Germany fighting in the war. Grandma was back home working as a waitress at a local hotel resort. She began to have an affair with resorts the wealthy general manager. One day while they were wrapped up in moment of lustful, sin and rapture, she left her three year old daughter, and four year old son unattended in the car with a loaded gun. The children thought it was a toy and began playing with it. The boy, who was my father, accidently shot and killed his little sister. This is said to be the event that ended my Grandparents marriage and outed the affair in their small town.

Grandma would go on to marry the wealthy businessman and my father would be illegally adopted by him, taking on his last name. Grandma continued to blame him for the death of his sister. That much I know was true in these stories as other sources have been able to confirm this. He was treated like the family outcast by his step and half siblings. I have only spoken to one of them since his funeral in 1987. She, his youngest half-sister, has since not spoken to me since 2000. Although she was a big part of my childhood and put on a not so convincing front that her dad would send me gifts for birthdays and holidays. They had a shared banking account, and she would write a check on his behalf or sign cards for him. While the effort was nice on her part, I would later come to see him for the fake person he was when I went to college and my “college fund” he was supposed to have saved for me out of my father’s death benefits was suddenly not a thing.  I was not heart broken when he passed away in my 20’s.

Dad grew up with a few close family members who still speak very highly of him. Always the sweet, kind person who could make you laugh. The life of the party who would go above and beyond to help a friend in need. Complete strangers in my hometown will spark up conversations with me in the frozen food section because I look just like him. They will tell me how much they adored him and how sad they were when he had passed. I have never heard a person say one unkind work about him. But where was that love and admiration when he was struggling the most? Did he give up trying to be heard by that point? By the time I started this journey of self healing and putting my dads trauma to rest for myself (and hopefully a little for him too), I had to know more about what he was like and what his support system looked like. The quest to learn more had begun.