This will probably be a confused post. I found something out yesterday that I just didn’t see coming. At all.
I’ll try to make a long story short. My mother has two siblings: a sister who is two years younger and a brother who is sixteen years younger. Their father, my grandfather, died in 1985. Their mother is still alive. I remember my grandfather as a great, sweet, wonderful person, and everyone speaks of him that way. My grandmother was and is fiercely devoted to him.
When my grandfather died it affected my grandmother very much. She loved him to death. I was eight years old and don’t remember any of it, apparently because my mother shielded me and my brothers from it as much as possible. My uncle was eighteen or nineteen at the time, living at home, and his mother going bonkers obviously affected him.
Many years later his first child is born. At the baptism, something happened which caused my family and his family to sever basically all bonds of contact. I know very little of this except that my uncle drank a lot and was, well, crazy, to use the words my mother uses. Little by little we get back in touch and have met a few times in the last few years.
This last week my uncle starts drinking heavily, doesn’t go to work, and suffers from depression. My grandmother calls my mother and says my uncle wants her to come. She does and eventually she finds out what this is all about.
Apparently, my grandfather sexually molested him. I don’t know details and don’t want to.
My first thought was that it couldn’t possibly be true. No way. My grandfather could not have done that. Impossible. Not him. But it would explain a lot. So at the same time it answers quite a few questions and makes no goddamn sense whatsoever. But my grandmother and mother both accept it and believe it. If they do, I can’t really see why I should doubt it.
Which means that everything is different, and my uncle has suffered beyond words. Of course he couldn’t say anything when his father died and his mother went half-mad with grief. And then the years go by, he honours his father’s memory, and it becomes more and more impossible to break the silence. The secret breaks up his family, his life… and finally he says something. He’s in a psych ward right now. I hope it helps him.
I’ll have more to say later. Right now I’d just like to hear some really smart things from Dopers. Life is upside down.
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