Weird adoptive ancestor death facts

I've written a few times about my adoptive father; this one might be the most significant of these posts; look under the Adoptive father label for more.

When trying to research his birth and death dates, I noticed something which I found odd that I've kept forgetting to post about. His father, whom I never met that I'm aware of, outlived him by almost eight months. His paternal grandfather, whom I also never met, preceded him in death by only five months.

I find it odd that these men from three successive generations died within 13 months of each other.

I've been thinking all weekend . . .

. . . , well, about two things really, but one of them is private and I've already shared it with the appropriate person. The other is a complicated thought about Memorial Day, and one I want to be a little careful with.

So many civilians approach veterans this weekend with well-intended gratitude for their service, but that isn't what this weekend is about. It's for those who gave their very lives in service of their country, and no, giving up family time and all the other things that come with military service, short of the ultimate sacrifice, are not the same thing. Please, this day out of all the year is not the one to thank veterans for our service. It is the time, though, to share in our profound sadness for our friends who are no longer with us because they died defending our nation. They are too often forgotten, and even this weekend that is allegedly dedicated to remembering them itself too often distracts from that. I think that Memorial Day would have been better left observed on May 30, so that at least some years it wouldn't be more of an excuse for a mini-vacation than a day-long opportunity to pause and remember.

But this weekend, I find myself thinking of those who lost their lives not as a direct result of in-theater action, or of preparing for such, but in the aftermath of such service. In particular, I've been thinking of my dad. In truth, I'll probably never know how accurate my thoughts are, but they are good for me to consider anyway. And these thoughts are the ones I want to be careful of.

I'm sure I've written about dad's problems before. As long as I can remember, my adoptive father was an alcoholic who never really accepted me for who I was, unequipped as I was to recreate his glory days of youthful athletic excellence. I was fourteen when he took his own life.

But dad was also a veteran of the Korean Conflict, an Army vet who was shot in battle. And it has only recently occurred to me to wonder how much this had to do with the rest of his life, including his broken marriages and relationships, his self-medication with alcohol, and his suicide. There is a much greater focus today on how trauma ravages the psyche long after it is experienced, a truth that I know first-hand due to an entirely different set of circumstances from those affecting most veterans. Back in my dad's day, the stigma associated with perceived weakness likely made the struggle in some ways more difficult. To whom was a veteran to turn for support?

Is this why dad turned to the bottle? I will never know. Is this, at least in part, why he took his life? Likewise, a mystery.

I know that there is a danger in recognizing among the heroes we remember this weekend those many veterans who die by their own hands after returning home. I realize that glorifying suicide is a dangerous thing for those who struggle in the same battle every day. We shouldn't do anything to make this option look more attractive to them. We should find other ways to support and help them. But this weekend, I think it might be good for us to quietly remember those broken men and women whose "ultimate sacrifice" may not have been so obvious, and silently thank them, too, for their service to our nation, without doing it in a way that ever encourages others to seek that end to their own battle.

Dad, thank you for giving your life for my freedom.

My mother's son?

I suppose that sometimes I have been so worried about not being my adoptive father's son that I have not been on guard against a different type of existential threat. I tell people that her worst fault was her taste in men, but I think that was just a symptom of her root issue: that woman was unmatched at hiding her self.

To be clear, though, rather than alarmist: I am not talking about a threat to actual physical existence here. 

An overdue post

What do you say, on Father's Day, to a biological father who left you to return to his family shortly after you were born, not even leaving you his name for your own?

What do you say, on Father's Day, to an adoptive father who never managed to accept you for who you were, lived as long as he could in a bourbon bottle, and when he couldn't anymore, stopped living with a self-inflicted bullet?

What do you say, on Father's Day, to a stepfather who betrayed your trust and taught you to betray yourself, who systematically trained you that there was no denying the pleasure your body wanted, who warped your entire life?

Perhaps I can finally say, to each of them, two things that are very important for me: Thank you, and I forgive you.

Stanley: Thank you for giving me life; I would not exist without you. I forgive you for not knowing what was important for a while, and for siring me during that time, and for leaving me to go back where you belonged. I hope you found yourself there, and that the love of your wife and your children overcame the void you were trying to fill.

Gary: Thank you for trying to be the dad I needed. I forgive you for not knowing how to set aside your hopes and expectations for me, your longing for your own simpler days. I know that it would be unhealthy to apologize to you for not being the son you wanted. I hope that in death you have found the grace and peace that eluded you in life, that the Savior has welcomed you home to the place in the Father's heart to which he came to restore you.

Ed: Thank you for teaching me so many of the skills I've needed. I forgive you for misusing my sexuality to serve yours, which of course you were also misusing at the same time. I hope that you have broken the bonds of sexual slavery which you did not understand were consuming you.

I struggle, still, to give this reality full rein in my life, but I pray, heavenly Father, that you will provide for each of these men the wholeness in You which we all need.

Family bookends

This morning, as I shared the two of these with a friend who is struggling, is the first time I have ever noticed how similar in meter this poem is to this song written over a decade before.  It's almost as if what I wrote as part of my mom's eulogy is a continuation of the song I wrote following my sister's death.  Thematically they are, of course, very different, and I've never even considered setting the more recent of the two to music.

Maybe I could write an ode to my adoptive father, as well, and make it a complete set (er, suite)?  I suppose that, if God gives me one in my sleep, I will probably get up and write it down here, at least.

Ahhh

Last night was pretty close to going home again, even though they were never, strictly speaking, my home.

My uncle's generous spirit lives on in his son, my cousin.

It was wonderful to spend this time with family I haven't seen in so long. What a complicated family tree, though. Here's who I saw: my adoptive father's step-father's 1) sister, 2) brother-in-law, 3) nephew, 4) daughter-in-law, 5) grandson, 6) granddaughter-in-law and 7) great-granddaughter. My wife and I, then, were my adoptive father's step-father's step-adoptive-grandson and step-adoptive-granddaughter-in-law.

So I'm sort of a graft onto a graft onto the family tree.  But they don't much seem to see me that way, and I am grateful!

More on the visit later . . .

An older example - edited

Very early in my faith journey, while we were still living in Biloxi, I encountered the idea that the biggest obstacle to our receiving God's blessings and transformation in our lives is unforgiveness.  How can we heal from a hurt to which we insist on clinging?  It's like continually scraping off a scab before the underlying skin and tissue have had a chance to heal.

My first encounter with this, in early 1985, was my realization that I needed to forgive my alcoholic (and adoptive) father for not being the dad I needed.  He'd never been able to accept me for who I was, and I'd figured out that I was deeply scarred by that.  He'd been dead for a decade by then, so it wasn't as if I could approach him to offer forgiveness and seek reconciliation, yet I still needed to experience the process for myself.  I remember lying in bed each night, recognizing that I needed to forgive him and that I didn't know how, asking God to do what I could not.  Before long I realized that the way he treated me and his alcoholism and suicide were all commonly rooted in his own deep brokenness.  I found myself praying for healing for his soul, that he would somehow, by God's grace, enter into the eternity that he rejected while he was alive.  Soon, I found myself understanding him far better than I ever had before and sincerely wanting the best for him, and the peacefulness that brought to my own soul was tangible.

So there, in a nutshell, was the reiterative process of forgiveness where no other person could participate.  Shouldn't I expect to need a similar process to completely forgive myself?

Taking my temperature

At the beginning of each group therapy session, we held hands as we "checked in" with our current feeling/emotion and requested the amount of time each of us expected we'd need to cover whatever agenda we'd prepared to discuss.  Even the therapists requested time at the start of the meeting for their agenda. Rarely was all of the session time fully accounted for, but if it was, we'd adjust as we thought we could to accommodate each other's agenda. One night after I'd been meeting with the group for a few weeks, and after I'd been briefly suspended over a misunderstanding of the program rules as they'd been communicated to me via two different channels, I was sitting next to one of the two therapists who ran the group sessions. After everyone had checked in, she observed that my hand was "really cold."

"That's a sign of fear, you know," she said matter-of-factly.  The feeling I'd checked in with is lost in the fog of the intervening years, but I certainly hadn't checked in with "afraid."  Maybe "calm."  At any rate, I was pretty sure I knew what I was feeling and that it wasn't fear.  In retrospect, I now recognize that I was always "nervous" (yes, this is one of the terms we use to make our fearful feelings more palatable) going to any of my therapy sessions at that point in my treatment.  An important role of the counseling team, indeed of the entire therapy group, was to challenge our misperceptions of reality, but a good therapist knows that there are effective and not-so-much ways of doing that for each patient.  Kate was about to give me a giant shove along my journey to emotional health.  I don't know how conscious she was of how important this moment would become for me, but I was completely unaware and, as always, utterly convinced of my "rightness."

"Nah, my hands are always cold," I answered dismissively, not realizing that something deeply transformative was about to begin for me.

Being right had been the most important thing in my life for as long as I can remember.  It was my defense against an adoptive father who never accepted my athletic shortcomings and a group of peers with whom I never fit in, and was the chief source of my self-image.  I was pretty sure that I knew myself, even though I couldn't yet begin to reconcile that self-concept with the reason that I was in this therapy group. I was confident that I was right now, too.  Kate was as cautiously non-confrontational as she could be, recognizing that my self-assuredness was more central to me than a mere tool in my arsenal to commit my offenses, yet was also the latter, and had to be dealt with.  

She turned slightly toward me. "When we experience fear," she began to explain, "our fight-or-flight reflex kicks in.  The body's natural response learned through ages of experience is to prepare for a possible injury to the vital organs, and more blood is directed to them, all located near the center of our bodies, leaving less blood available for our extremities.  As a result, our fingers and toes feel cold because of the reduced flow of warming blood to them."

She was as sure of herself as I was.

"But I've had cold hands for as long as I can remember, all the way back to my childhood," I protested, still feeling dismissive.  I couldn't figure out what point she was trying to make, nor understand for the life of me why she thought this was so important.

She turned to face me almost directly.  "Tom," she said, making sure she had my attention, and speaking with unmistakable sympathy, "I have no doubt that you've been afraid for as long as you can remember."

I still get chills, over sixteen years later, almost as strongly as I did that evening when I immediately recognized the truth of her words.  I remember little else from that session, but in that moment I knew something about myself that had always been true and that I had never recognized before.

And thus began my progress toward health.  Oh, the journey had started months before, and I'm certain that evening couldn't have happened without the groundwork that had preceded it.

Today I found myself thinking of this key milestone in therapy as I "checked in" with myself concerning an upcoming trip, looking for any physiological signs that I might be deceiving myself or others about my own intentions.  They are noticeably absent.

The hardest day of the year

It isn't that I completely hate Father's Day.  I think it's important to have a day on which we honor the men who raised us, who taught us how to be independent men and eventually fathers ourselves.

It isn't that I am sad not to have had a good dad who I feel like I can honor on this day.  I thank my adoptive father for doing the best he could, even though he was so broken.

It's that there is no other day of the year that makes me feel more like a fraud, that reminds me what an utter failure I was.  While everyone is Happy Father's Day-ing me along with the other dads, I know in my heart that it's just because they don't know.  I just nod and thank them, return the sentiment when it's warranted.  But I know.

Every other day of the year I've learned to cut myself some slack.  Maybe if she could stand to be around I might feel differently, but in her absence, there isn't any chance I can believe that she isn't still broken because of my failure.

She's going to come by to pick up the grandkids in a few minutes, and maybe there will be enough of a greeting from her that I'll be able to live with myself a little more easily today.  But she doesn't owe me that.  She's given me way more than she owes me already.

Dad's grave site

First of all, I was sure I must've blogged about some of this background info before, but can't find it to link to it.

"Dad" is a more complicated word for me than for most. When I refer to dad, I'm almost always referring to my adoptive father, who married my mom when I was about 3, I think, as opposed to my biological father - whom I've never met - or stepfather.

Anyway, dad was a tortured man, an alcoholic whose glory days of high school and semi-pro athletics were past, and whose adopted son was never going to be the athlete he had been. When he took his own life when I was 14, in some ways he did me a favor. I no longer had a dad who treated me with disdain. Mom went on to get involved with my stepfather a couple years later, who had some positive and terribly negative influence on my life, and I inevitably grew up despite all that, with the warped sense of normalcy that I've learned so many of us share.

In recent years, I've unsuccessfully tried to visit dad's gravesite on several visits back home, usually on the weekend. He was buried in '74, and while I was pretty sure where his grave was, I never could locate it. But now the cemetery office was open, so I had the specific location of his plot. I still couldn't find it.

I called over one of the workers, who showed me where to look on the markers for the plot numbers. It turns out his marker had sunk. "No problem," he assured me, they could raise it for me. The guy had only worked there for about three weeks, and when he and his coworker went to pry it up, the concrete base was broken in half. I'm pretty sure it happened right then, when they were prying it, but they hadn't cleared it sufficiently for me to be certain.

They don't use concrete anymore, because it deteriorates over time. So to mount the bronze marker on granite in place of the current concrete will cost around $800. Dad had other kids from previous marriages, but I've never known any of them, and my sister and mom have long since passed on. I haven't decided whether it makes sense to spend the money on his marker. That I know of, nobody other than me has visited the grave in at least two decades, so I figure there's no rush. In the grand scheme of things, I think I'll keep that money in pocket until after we replace our 45-year-old furnace and central air unit.

how i got there, with why you may not want to be my friend

I'm writing this post on 3/23/2015, but back-dating it so that casual visitors do not encounter it.

so i started this post to explain why i commented on someone's FB post, but i have since found fresh condemnation, so it occurs to me that the more important point is: i understand if you just don't want anything more to do with me when you get to the end. i have retitled the post accordingly. but please understand: the reason this post is constructed as it is isn't to excuse away what i did. i am solely responsible for that, and my feelings tend to agree with the people who condemn people like me. my main concern now is simply to love those i have hurt so deeply, and to remember that my feelings aren't the same thing as Truth.

I know they often get a bad rep among the non-riding public, and I know that the population of mostly non-thug bikers everywhere feels compelled to go to war against the stereotypes. But to hear someone say, "Bikers are the nicest people you'll ever know," is a blanket generalization in the other direction that just. completely. gets under my skin. Here's why:

The first biker I ever knew personally was the first guy my widowed mom started dating, about 18 months after my alcoholic dad shot himself to death while the rest of us were out of town on vacation shortly after I'd turned 14. For me, life with my dad had been worse than that last horrid clause, for aside from his general drunken stumblings and ramblings and rants, I couldn't figure out for the life of me how to gain his love, acceptance, and respect. He'd been a high achieving high school athlete, and to describe myself as unathletic, even mildly klutzy, would be kind. I was smart, though, one of the smartest kids in my school, and he was a self-taught electrical engineer, so you'd think that would have resonated with him. But he never managed (if he even tried) to hide his impatience and disappointment when I failed to grasp some "simple" skill that he thought he was patiently and encouragingly teaching me: the baseball that hit me in the lip again this time when I failed to catch it, another missed layup, the fishing line maddeningly entangled in the bush behind me (these specific instances happened between 7- and 10-years-old). He'd been dead for over a year when mom was finally forced to reveal - because she was afraid someone else would let the cat out of the bag - that he was my adoptive father. She'd been a young, single mom when she met him, and he was willing to accept me "as his own" (he thought) and adopt me, and was a good financial provider for us. My sister was his biological daughter, and on the day my mom finally revealed the truth about my paternity, I suddenly understood why Karen had been able to bring a light to his eyes that I had never seen otherwise. My own biological father was not a topic that she was going to discuss; he clearly hadn't wanted to know me or provide for me in any way once he'd returned to his family (where he belonged, I've concluded). That, along with his name, is all I know about him.

She was careful when she met the new guy, going out with him a few times before letting him meet my sister or me, because she wanted to be sure she could trust him and didn't want to introduce a possible series of guys to us. Once she was fairly sure they were going to be seeing each other for a while, she invited him over for dinner so that we could meet him. It wasn't very long after that first meeting that he convinced her to let him offer me an under-the-table job helping out in his after-hours private garage, because a boy my age could learn responsibility through a job and needed to earn some money to call his own. At first I just cleaned up around the shop, and fetched, cleaned and put away tools, thereby learning what they were called and the purpose of each. "A good helper anticipates what the mechanic is going to need and has it ready for him," he insisted, and it was a lesson that has served me well in various contexts throughout my professional career. With gradually decreasing supervision I started being allowed to work on the vehicles, progressing to increasingly complicated work but never reaching the point of anything like tearing down an engine. He didn't get very many of those jobs anyway. There was quite a bit of body work, though, prepping vehicles for repair paint and an occasional overall paint job. Without belaboring this with further details: this job was my main source of income throughout my high school years. Toward the end of the work day - or evening, when things got to the point that mom was hanging out in the house while we worked in the garage - I'd be offered a beer along with whoever else was working.

He ended up being the one who helped me get ready for my driver's test, and he eventually overcame my mom's protectiveness to get her to let me learn to ride a motorcycle. I started on a small BMW - maybe 125cc? I'm not even certain whose bike that was; probably one of the young guys who was always hanging around and working out of the shop. I soon found a good deal on a used 360cc Honda, bought with my own money, on which I did my road riding and took my license test. Eventually, an artistic friend would paint The Hermit and the symbols from Led Zeppelin's fourth album on both sides of the gas tank. It was my solo-riding bike, and my senior year of high school I'd pick up my girlfriend before school on decent days and drive her home after. I remember having to double back one morning to pick up someone's books that fell off the rack on the way to school, but can't for the life of me remember if they were hers, mine, or both. (I suppose I could go into the other room and ask her whether she recalls.)

He and I would go out riding together at least a couple times a month. He eventually bought a second Harley, and once I was skilled enough to handle it, he'd let me ride his 1000cc Sportster while he rode the 1200cc SuperGlide sometimes when we rode together. Many other times I just rode along on the back of his. I wasn't of legal drinking age, which in Maryland back then was 18 for beer and wine, but I was close enough that when I dismounted a Harley and went into a bar with a middle-aged chaperone I was invariably served. Since I was usually riding on or near an expensive bike that he owned, he didn't let me overindulge when I was driving.

I can't describe what a gift all of this was for a kid whose dad(s) had never managed to love and accept him for who he was. Perhaps the reader has a sense of how wonderful this confidence and support might have felt, without my trying to further elaborate, since I could never do it justice anyway. I wouldn't have ever called him my hero, and didn't exactly think of him as a father figure - his personality wasn't conducive to that role. But he made a huge difference in my young life, and I learned many valuable skills from him. I'd have done pretty much anything he asked of me.

What a great guy, right?  Everybody agreed.

And it was all a setup, as I learned so life-alteringly - no, I'm not engaging in hyperbole - on Thanksgiving weekend of 1977.

By then I was a 17-year-old stepping into adolescent rebellion. I'd begun smoking pot occasionally and in other ways not always acting responsibly or doing what was best for me. I'd always been a bit of a procrastinator, and part of my downfall was being smart enough to get away with that. I was thinking about not going to college right away because I didn't have a clue what I wanted to do - a high school counselor would eventually convince me otherwise. ("You've got to go to college," she insisted, winter of my senior year, so I did.) I don't know how much these issues factored into mom's boyfriend's ability to talk her into letting me go with him to Philadelphia for his annual trip. In hindsight I think she might have wanted me there partly for his protection: I think it had been the previous year that he'd become the first survivor of a series of claw-hammer attackers in Philly, but he'd gotten beaten pretty badly. But this was primarily intended to be a coming-of-age trip for me. Neither mom nor I had any idea of his real intentions.

We indeed started the weekend off in the City of Brotherly Love, but soon encountered a complication he hadn't anticipated: the drinking age in PA was 21, and I was a not-particularly-mature-looking 17. That meant I couldn't get served beer, and that meant that he couldn't enjoy seeing me let loose and enjoy myself more, as he put it. He could have bought some beer and we could have imbibed in the hotel room, but we both understood that drinking wasn't really the point of the weekend. It seemed like a bigger issue to him than it was to me; I was having a fine time hanging out without the alcohol. But he seemed disappointed, and had cleared a new plan with mom, so I agreed to the change in venue for the rest of the weekend. I've written more about that weekend here, so follow that link and then come back here. It's the least disgusting part of the rest of this narrative.

So from Philly we went to New York City, where the drinking age was more friendly to people with our respective intentions. He didn't have any trouble getting us a room at the YMCA subsequently made famous by the Village People, and that is where, on Saturday night when I was accommodatingly buzzed, his objectively undeniable sexual abuse of me began. (To this day I leave the room when the DJ invariably starts playing that song.) I've since learned through my own therapy that everything before that was part of the grooming process, including a fair amount of playful physical contact which had always been an element of being in his presence. And it probably seems strange for someone who isn't so intimately familiar with sexual abuse to consider that he was grooming himself as much as me. He had to think that I was so special to him that he couldn't hold back his desire to share these sexual experiences with me, even though I was underage and he was dating my mom. I can't tell you how many times over the next 18 months he told me how special I was, how he felt differently about me than about other men, even though I was still a boy and (as I later learned) he considered himself bisexual - he described himself that way to my mom well before he married her, and long before I told her what he had done to me. He probably also believed that I owed him some return for all that he had done for me. When we got back on Sunday, mom was convinced that I'd left town a boy and come home a man. It would be nearly twenty years before, in my therapist's office, I'd finally tell her the truth of what happened starting that weekend, and then only because she deserved to know why I had turned myself in for doing something along similar lines that she didn't at all understand. I am so grateful that she believed me immediately.

There's more I've written about post-New York here, but you probably don't want to read that. There's the link, though, in case you do, and it does reveal more about me (that you probably don't want to know).

I think he was incapable of having a sexual relationship with someone he truly respected and considered an equal. Therefore I believe that I may have had as much sexual contact with him in that 18 months as he had with my mom in their entire life together.

The Jackson 5 sang that "one bad apple don't spoil the whole bunch." (Okay, when you're talking about actual fruit or workplace morale, yes, it does, but in terms of stereotypes:) Of course not! I know that most bikers aren't like my stepfather, and I don't by any means hate or mistrust bikers in general. I don't even hate him, even though sometimes I still work on forgiving him. Neither do I think that most bikers deserve the stereotype that people generally have of them, and don't hold those stereotypes myself. But biking is as amoral as money is: the fact that a person rides says no more about them than the color of their hair does; there are mostly good bikers and a few bad bikers, just like any other group of people you might describe. And even though the good may strongly outnumber the bad, surely the reader can understand why blanket generalizations about the wonderfulness of bikers rub me the wrong way at least as much as negative ones about their moral character bother bikers.

There's more to this area - and more importantly, to me - that the reader should know, and I shouldn't leave it for inference as I have done above. I usually only share it in person, though it isn't really a secret; I've personally told several hundred people in various situations, including the contexts of therapy, family, close friendship, men's fellowship, and testimony in front of a large group. The reader might be surprised that the biggest reason I don't share it more often is not fear of rejection, though it once was. Mostly it's a matter of there almost never being a good time to raise this topic, so I try to wait until it looks like someone is committing to a deep enough level of friendship that to not tell them feels like a betrayal. You can read more about why I draw the line there in this post, but it isn't because I don't want people to know. I wish everyone knew, that I had no doubt that anyone in my life would still choose to be if they knew. I wish I could say that I've remained as accepting of myself as that post might indicate toward the end, but I still hate that I became what I hate, and no matter how many intervening decades pass, I think I will always hate myself at least a little for what I did. I still struggle to receive forgiveness for the abuse I committed as an adult against someone who should have been able to trust me implicitly. (And I've never blamed the abuse I committed on the abuse I received. That also would be wrong.)

The abuse I experienced in my youth has profoundly affected countless other decisions in my life that I must live with, and it is sometimes a challenge to see God at work through them rather than simply lament their effects on my life. But I am convinced that He is continually at work, that He was with me even in the midst of the worst choices that have marked my life - those of others and my own, my immoral decisions as well as my merely broken ones.

One final thought: my stepfather vehemently and convincingly denied ever touching my sister inappropriately, and I tend to believe him, even though part of me would way prefer that he had been more responsible for her drug problem than I think I might have been. I don't think he had the motivation to supply her with drugs that he had for me, but I know he provided stronger substances to others than the pot that he occasionally had for me. He boasted to me about providing drugs to other sex partners. Could he have supplied Karen, too, even if he never did abuse her sexually?