A MEMORY I CANNOT FORGET

BASED ON MY DECEASED FATHER

"A Memory I Cannot Forget" based on my deceased father.

He was a nice-looking man but a terrible person. He and my mother lived across the street from each other when they married at a very young age. Mom was 16 and he was 18. I was born when mom was 17 herself. Dad thought of himself as a jack of all trades. The problem was that he never kept a job very long and we lived off mom's meager income from the weave room at JP Stevens.

Dad drove an 18-wheeler for a short time before he quit and joined a union where he learned sheet metal cutting and later as a welder. He gave mom a hundred dollars a month for the household expenses which was never enough. These jobs never lasted very long, and he would go months being unemployed.

Mother went to night school at Greenville Tech where she learned Gregg Shorthand, and eventually in later years, worked her way up to being the executive secretary to the Vice President of the cotton division. Dad continued his tinkering and on again off again employment.

Mom's sister had divorced, and my Aunt Lill had a nervous breakdown, doing a stent at the psychiatric hospital in Columbia, SC. When she was through with her electric shock treatments, she came to live with us.

Lois, my mom, and Aunt Lill walked on pins and needles when dad was around. I don't think there are very many sisters as close as they were in every way. In essence, I had two mothers, my aunt being barren of children, thought of me as "blood of my blood and bone of my bone."

While mom was at work, my no count dad sexually assaulted Aunt Lill. She told him that if he ever touched her again, she would kill him. She was fully recovered from her breakdown and shortly moved to Georgia near another of my aunts.

Mom and Aunt Lill were convinced that dad had wired under the house a rig where he could tape and listen to their conversations at the kitchen table. He always felt, with good reason, that they were talking about him. They asked me to crawl under the house to see if it was true that he had installed a device to capture their conversations. Sure enough, I found the device but would not touch it for fear that he would know somebody had messed with it. After that proved true, they were very careful about what they said about him.

Dad had confessed to me when I was about ten years old that when he was a hobo hopping freight trains, that he had killed a man who tried to rob him and pushed him out of the moving boxcar. Really, I don't know why he had to share that sordid detail with me. I was afraid of my dad from that moment on. He had a violent temper, and you could never know when he might explode!

My wife, Gwen, and I had two children, Rusty and Meg. On a sunny day in September, we decided to take Rusty to a Clemson football game while Meg loved to stay with her Nana and Papa. My dad asked her if she wanted to go fishing with him. Excitedly, she said yes. They dug worms in the back yard with her innocently giggling at the wiggly worms. He hitched the trailer with the little flat bottom boat to the old beat-up Subaru truck he had, and off they went to some obscure lake that he knew about. When out on the body of water, he forced my little innocent six-year-old to perform oral sex on him. He told her that if she ever told anybody about it that he would kill me, her mom, her brother, and her Nana. She never did tell us until he was dead for fear that he would make good on his promise. Afterwards, any time she would see a Subaru truck like his, she would tremble with anxiety. The same was when she smelled cigar smoke from the old cigars he smoked. My child lived in fear about which none of us knew.

Meg had mental problems as a result of this kind of rape and became a cutter in her teen years. She would cut her forearms with a razor just enough to bleed. Then she would smear the blood onto the pages of a journal she kept, all the time writing in the blood journal. Meg suffered from many ailments including anxiety, depression, PTSD, and was diagnosed as being obsessive compulsive. She was in and out of various treatment programs and had been admitted to Carolina Behavioral Center for treatment forty-two times as well as other centers. My wife and I sent her to Jacksonville, Florida for a "Cure-all" for addictions. The cost was $15,000. for a thirty-day program. Wow! She got drunk on the airplane coming home. So much for wasted money. We exhausted all our savings on her, hoping and praying for her recovery.

She was a heavy drinker of vodka and would drink at least a quart a day, "medicating" herself. When she had prescription drugs, she would be much more lucid. She would stop her meds and pretty soon binge drink again. She had a very high IQ which was three points below her brother, Rusty. He graduated from Furman University with a degree in Psychology. After taking the GRE exam for psychology, they told him that he had scored higher than anybody on that exam at Furman.

Meg could have done anything she set her mind to if not for my dad. When she was in high school, she was invited to join one of the sororities. She attended the induction at the home of one of the girls. The single mother left the house to the girls for their party. One of the girls called some friends of hers to come over. The friends were three high school football players. They took my Meg into a closet and all three of them raped her. She would never tell me their names, because she knew that I would have killed them all. Meg became a very perceptive manipulator and could "read" people.

She was supposed to come over from her apartment to our house for Thanksgiving dinner. She never showed and always had her days and nights mixed up, sleeping all day and being up all night. We called and left messages on her answering machine, feeling that she was sleeping. I went over and found her dead in her bed, a sight no father should ever have to witness or forget. The autopsy said that her pancreatitis had ruptured and shut down all her systems.

Rusty had always resented her for all the money we spent on advocating for her and her treatments. After her death and reading her blood journal she had written and hidden from us, Rusty said that he now has a very different and understanding view of Meg and all the problems she had endured. We had her remains cremated, which was her wish and buried the ashes in the back corner of our yard, where I had made a little garden of shade loving plants like hostas, ferns, and other plants.

At her memorial service, our pastor conducted a service on God's Grace and Peace. In the obituary, we invited all of Meg's friends from AA, NA, and FAVOR (Faces And Voices Of Recovery), hoping the message might reach some of them. We lost many good friends because of Meg's addictions, but we were never ashamed of the hand we had been dealt as her parents. We always tried to advocate for her without enabling her.

These things all started when my evil, nasty and perverted dad took her fishing. That is where my anger and abiding resentment of my dad resided until my later years. I carried this hatred in my heart for many years, but thanks to my higher power, I was able to forgive him and turn it all over to God who has lifted that burden from my heart.

Any prayers for our family are muchly appreciated as we continue to heal.