Mightier Acorns

A sexual predator has died.

I’m not going to tell you that story, because it’s not my story to tell. It belongs to the survivors who were damaged by that person, and by those who served as enablers and protectors to the abuser. It does not belong to those enablers and protectors, either, even though they might see themselves as victims, too.

For a family historian, this story sits uncomfortably in a place made only of memory. There are no public records to document what happened. The private records that tell parts of the story may never come to light. Only those involved know that the story exists, and even they only know their small part of it. The whole story can never be told, and the jagged pieces that remain will never fit together. The only true thing those jagged pieces share with the whole is that both are sharp and continue to do damage to those who know their part of the story.

The whole story died with the only person who experienced all of it, and even before they died, they almost certainly lost most memory of what they had done. The human mind is not a recording device. It only captures a fraction of the stimuli of light, sound, and other sensory input that bombards it for, in this person’s case, 652,536 hours. Whatever fraction of what got processed and interpreted into memories was rewritten each time they were recalled, and faded away completely if they were not recalled.

Biases affect a person’s recollections – shame, fear, discomfort, etc. – a foggy sludge in which the memories get buried. With age, time and disease will rob a person of their memories altogether, or leave them clinging to fragments that only make sense in brief flashes.

So the story, such as it was, has been untellable for some time. And now that the perpetrator is gone, it will grow increasingly untellable. And yet, the story lingers in those dangerous fragments, waiting to cut again.

Facts and Feelings

There is a popular lie that says, “facts don’t care about your feelings.”

The family historian knows facts, like date of birth, date of marriage, date of death, but truly only cares about them because of the feelings they brought. The joy and pain of a child arriving, the terror and joyful anticipation of a wedding, the looming finality of deaths that may be sudden or lingering, dreaded or eagerly awaited. The feelings are what make the facts a story.

Fact: one February afternoon, we took out children to an indoor trampoline park in Timonium. I have videos, with timestamps, so I can prove that it happened. I can watch my children bouncing and having a ball.

Facts are the feet of a jumper pressing into the elastic fabric of a trampoline; life is the exhilaration at the weightless apex of the jump. Life is the tuck and roll of the somersault. Life is feeling.

Not all of our facts have good feelings to go with them. Sometimes I wasn’t the best parent. Sometimes I shouted in anger, sometimes I told embarrassing stories in front of impressionable friends. Nobody’s perfect. I made mistakes.

When we make mistakes, there are three things that must happen before we can expect the feelings caused by the mistakes to change. We have to acknowledge the mistake, change the behavior, and try to make amends. Even if we do all three things, feelings may linger.

In the stories I tell, I sometimes find facts about events that left everyone involved with hard feelings. We know about The Double Life of Uncle Jack, but we can only guess at how his daughter felt about being abandoned. We know the contours of Leo Callin’s “Tale of Two Mildreds,” but can only speculate what really ended those two marriages. The newspapers may tell us scandalous stories of alcohol, passion, interfering mothers, and hard economic times, but even if those are reliable facts, they may never reveal what the true feelings were.

We don’t know, in those stories, whether mistakes were acknowledged, behavior was changed, or amends were made. But I know some of the facts of the untellable story, and I know that those three things did not happen. As far as I know, they were never attempted; and it’s possible that the disease that affected the sexual predator made acknowledging anything a moot exercise by the time it ran its course.

Nomanisan Island

None of us is every truly alone, and nothing we do is without consequences.

The damage that abusers do is only part of the damage. They also depend on those around them to make excuses for their behavior, turn a blind eye to uncomfortable allegations, to believe them over their victims. There is a ripple effect as those around them who are not being directly abused contribute to the abuse, whether they know that’s what they’re doing or not.

When you’re the target of abuse of any kind, especially for a long time, you learn who to trust and who not to trust. And you learn not to give anyone the benefit of the doubt, because even someone who thinks they are being kind can hurt you.

“Surely, it’s not as bad as you think it is?”

Or

“It’s all in the past, now. Can’t bygones be bygones?”

Well-meaning words that might be helpful in another situation. A situation that didn’t have an Untellable story in the center of things, a black hole shifting the gravity well that the speaker couldn’t see. That’s a consequence of not telling the story to everyone: they can’t know that they’re amplifying the harm done by the predator they are unwittingly defending.

Leading to

“Why are you holding a grudge? You need to learn to forgive.”

No. In this case, you need to learn to live with not knowing the whole story, and show some grace to the survivor.

No Closure For Abusers

There is more than one kind of abuse.

There is often more than one abuser. The one who is not a sexual predator may try to convince their target that their abuse isn’t abuse at all, or if it is, it’s not on the same scale as the predator. But that’s a lie. Harm is harm, and hiding behind a different kind of harm doesn’t change it into something good.

There is a path to coming back from some kinds of abuse, but they all depend on the abuser’s choices. They must acknowledge what they did wrong. They must stop the abuse. They must find a way to make amends – and that does not mean that the target of their abuse must tell them how to do so.

Demanding that the target of their abuse meet them halfway, or that they accept responsibility for any part in the abuse, is a continuation of the abuse. Making that demand nullifies the “stop the abuse” part of the formula. Is this an insolvable problem? It might be. I suggest seeking professional therapy to try to solve it.

The End of the Story

Since I can’t tell you the story, this will have to serve as the “ending” – I’m sorry if it is unsatisfying. I’m sorry if you are uncomfortable. I’m uncomfortable with it, too.

I’d tell you my part, but I can’t do that without doing more harm, and I can’t simply say nothing without doing a different kind of harm. Is this an insolvable problem? It might be.

But I put this placeholder here to remind you that when you’re telling your innocent family stories, and you get a frosty response or a hostile reaction, that might be a sign that you are missing some jagged, uncomfortable pieces of the whole story.

Try not to make it worse. Don’t press the issue or demand that someone tell you the whole story, because that may not be possible. Don’t react with anger. Just show some grace, and leave them some space.

The truth is, most of our stories are Untellable.