When They Die

Last week, while visiting with friends and cousins at my vacation home in Michigan, I received the last news I would have expected.  My cousin told me her brother had died last March from prostate cancer.  Aside from my sadness about losing another cousin (I’ve lost six, mostly in the past few years) I felt very little.  But I keep thinking I should.  Because this person was not only my cousin, but the perpetrator of the childhood sexual abuse I experienced between the ages of 8 and 14.

The cousin who shared the news with me is his older sister.  I am close to her, and she knows that I was sexually abused, but she does not know who did it.  I have never told her.  If she ever asks, I will not lie to her, but I have never felt the need to disclose that last piece.  She wasn’t all that close to her brother, but he was still her brother.

Ironically, one of my best friends was sitting next to me when I got the news.  She knows the whole story.  I didn’t dare look at her because I was trying to stay in control and let my cousin express her grief.  Even more irony:  several weeks spoke on Tik Tok posting and shared the personal details about my abuse for the first time on line.  Several of my friends were in the room with me.  One of my best friends said he wanted to find the guy and kill him.   I told him there was a line.  None of us knew he was already dead.  

I keep waiting to feel SOMETHING.  I have discussed this with several other survivors who have survived their perpetrators and have not had any sudden enlightenment about what I “should” be feeling.  No one has anything to share with me except to take my time and process.  Which is why I’m writing today.

No one heals in silence.  It says so on my web page so I know it’s true.  Throughout my life, I have aways found release through talking and sharing.  If I keep something private it’s because I’ve been asked not to share it, or because I’m just not ready to.  People around me are always amazed at how much I share.  They’d be even more amazed at how much I DON’T share.

I always tell people there are two areas of questioning I’ll never respond to:  how much money I have, and what I like in bed.  All other areas of my life are an open book.  The family members I kept secrets for are dead.  And I’m beyond the reach of people that can harm me.  Mostly.

When I think of my dead cousin, I mostly remember some of the things he did that angered me as an adult.  I worried constantly because his chain of girlfriends and ex-wives always seemed to include women with daughters.  Long ago, I had to accept that there was nothing I could do about this.  He was a good-looking guy, with a gift of gab, and made a very good living.  He wasn’t hurting for female companionship.  I always wondered.  I made sure my girl cousins knew of his abuse, but they all told me they’d never experienced anything.  They never stayed the night at his house the way I did.

I never wanted to be around him, and our visits back to Indiana didn’t always coincide.  When they did, both his mother and my mother would urge us to get  together.  Even when my mother knew what he had done to me, this didn’t change.  She always would say, “But what would I tell your aunt?”  

He came to my parents’ house once while my husband and I were visiting, and I managed OK.  My husband wanted to kill him.  Another visit, however, didn’t go as well.  I suffered a major panic attack the next morning and almost threw myself out of my bedroom window.

And I’m still mad that I covered his mother’s funeral expenses.  All the money he bragged about making, I shouldn’t have had to do that.  But I was helping his sister with his mother’s care at the time, and after my aunt died my cousin chose to use the funds funeral expenses.

OK, now I am getting mad.  Guess I still have processing to do.

I’m not trying NOT to be mad.  I’m entitled to feel whatever I want to feel.  At this point, I think I just want to feel MORE.  

We both came from a dysfunctional family with alcohol and violence all over the place.  He was caught in a lot of the same traps I was.  I actually blame my mother and his mother for what happened more than I blame him.  They were the adults.  They were supposed to be protecting their children.  They didn’t.  They put us in the same bedroom, over and over again, until I was old enough to stop staying with them when my mother was gone.

I’m pretty sure this story isn’t over yet.  But this is it for now.  I will feel what I want to feel, when and if I feel it, and I will not feel shame or guilt over any part of it.  Most of the time what I feel when I think about what happened to me is just immense sadness.  I shouldn’t have had to live through it.  No child should have to.  But we do.