When an abuser dies.

 Grief is a puzzle -- and not just when it's a Wordle solution. 

This was Friday's puzzle. Don't @ me.

Something had been banging at me to resume looking into my family history, so early last week, I succumbed and signed up for a free trial of Ancestry. I started building out my tree with my nuclear family, as one does, and was bopping along, entering stuff I knew, when Ancestry offered me a hint about an obituary for Lawrence Cantwell.

My grandfather? I wondered. Dad's father was named Lawrence; he died when my father was nine years old. My brother was named after him. So I clicked through.

Nope, not my grandfather. My brother, who died in March of last year. This was the first I'd heard.

When I wrote my memoir Mom's House, I knew the story wasn't finished. To recap: My brother had been verbally and emotionally abusive to me since I was small. When my mother died in 2008, she left our family home to both of us. I wanted to sell the place; my brother tried every manipulative trick he could think of to keep us both owners of the house. Finally, I filed a partition action against him to force a sale. We came thisclose to mediation before he agreed to buy me out. That was in early 2018. Later that year, I published the memoir.

I hadn't heard from him, or anyone else in his side of the family, since. If it hadn't been for Ancestry bringing it to my attention, I still wouldn't know he was dead.

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People go through a whole range of emotions when someone they know dies, and adding abuse to the mix makes those emotions more complicated. This website lists many of the feelings abuse victims might have to work through: fear and anxiety, depression, guilt, loneliness, shame, helplessness, relief, disbelief, and anger. The site also mentions a phenomenon called disenfranchised grief, which can happen when, say, an abused person is upset when an abuser dies. Friends might wonder how the victim could grieve when the abuser did such horrible things to them. But an abused person can both acknowledge the horrible things and be sad about losing the good times. The abuser may have orchestrated the good times to keep the victim on the hook, but that doesn't mean the victim can't miss those good times and be sad that they're over forever. Humans are a bundle of contradictions.

But if the abused person expresses anger at the death of their abuser, that's also not okay, right? We're supposed to forgive those who trespass against us, and not forgiving someone who wronged you is bad for your own mental health, or so they say. And then, of course, we're told not to speak ill of the dead.

My opinion is that "don't speak ill of the dead" is horseshit. And alert hearth/myth readers already know my views on blanket forgiveness. Basically, I believe that forgiveness must be earned -- and frankly, my brother never earned my forgiveness. There was only one time that he came close. I wrote about it in Mom's House:

It came during the trip we made to Mom’s house in the summer of 2012. He cornered me in the garage for a chat. After a discussion about this and that, he gave me a serious look and said, “I know I was rough on you when we were kids.” And then he proceeded to share with me some personal revelations, most of which I won’t go into here. The key takeaway for me was that all through my childhood, he had been jealous of me. “They wanted you,” he said.

What I left out, when I described the scene in the book, was the vitriol with which he said it. He was still jealous of me. Fifty-five years later, he was still mad that his favorite sister had died and I'd come along to take her place. As if any of that had been my fault.

***

It's been almost a week since I learned of my brother's death, and I don't seem to be feeling many of the complicated emotions that abuse victims feel when their abuser dies. It's not that the abuse didn't happen. That's not in dispute. I think what's going on is that I've worked through these feelings long since. 

There's a chipper little Wikihow page for coping with the death of an abuser. Among the suggestions: Accept your feelings, however complicated; find ways to channel your anger; make a list of ways to give yourself closure; and so on. 

I gave myself closure by writing and publishing the memoir. I wasn't surprised when I lost contact with Lar and his family -- I knew it would be the result before I hit "publish" -- and I'm not surprised they didn't contact me when he died.

Am I relieved? No more -- and no less -- than I was when I got the settlement check. The house was the last thing we shared -- the last way he had to keep me on a string. That's a big reason why I wanted out from under it.

I'm sure I'll have complex feelings crop up from time to time; that's how grief works. But here's one feeling -- or goal, really -- I'm holding onto now: The guy who spent decades haranguing me about my weight and my health died at 74 -- relatively young, given that Mom lived to be 93. If I make it another ten years, I will have outlived him.

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Two more things I've discovered since learning about my brother's death (public records searches are a wonderful thing): 

1) In late 2017 -- long after I'd filed suit, but a few months before the settlement -- Lar and his wife bought a house in Florida. I have to think he was pressuring me to move back to Indiana for his own benefit.

2) As of the beginning of this month, Mom's house was still listed as owned by my brother...and my mom.

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These moments of WTF blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe, everybody!

I believe survivors.

I don't want to write this post.

It's already been a tough week for many of us who have suffered abuse in the past. Survivors of sexual abuse have had the worst time, I expect; a lot of them have been triggered by Dr. Christine Blasey Ford's testimony against Judge Brett Kavanaugh before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday. Her account of what happened to her at a party 30 years ago brought up memories -- for some of them, memories they'd thought long buried.

The good news, if there is any, is many of the folks -- both women and men -- who were triggered sought help. The National Sexual Assault Hotline operated by the Rape, Assault and Incest National Network (RAINN) saw its traffic spike by more than 200%. (The hotline is still open, by the way; you can call 1-800-456-HOPE any time.)

None of the junk I went through would qualify as sexual abuse, thank goodness. There was one time in college when I was on the receiving end of an unsolicited dick pic. Some guy came up to us at a bar (Nick's English Hut in Bloomington, Indiana) and offered to show us a photo of his "friend" -- and then did. He'd even framed it. Unbelievable. Seriously, gentlemen -- if you have a photo of your junk, keep it to yourself.

Anyway, it never went beyond him shoving the photo at us, which is nothing like what Deborah Ramirez says Kavanaugh did to her when they were in college. And yet I still remember it, 40 years later.

Still, I learned this week that when it comes to triggers, abuse is abuse. I mentioned in my memoir, Mom's House, that one way I learned to cope with the emotional and verbal abuse I endured as a child was to binge eat. This past Thursday, I spent the day at work avoiding live video coverage of the hearings; instead, I read live blogs of the proceedings to keep up. I might as well have watched the video. I went home Thursday night, ordered a pizza, and ate the whole thing.

The lines between types of abuse aren't clear-cut. After all, abusers typically use more than one tactic to keep their victims on the string. "Don't tell anybody -- this will be our little secret" is, of course, emotional abuse.

Anyway, I'd rather be doing just about anything than writing this post. I'd rather be telling you more about my most recent vacation and how it relates to that #escapevelocity thing I talked about a while back. Or I could be writing about my new knitting project, in which I've adapted a colorwork cowl pattern to double knitting. Heck, I could be working on that cowl right now.

But it's important for us to keep talking about this stuff, no matter how painful. For me, that dick pic is wrapped up with the anger and humiliation I felt when my brother teased me, and it's also attached to the memory of a radio station program director who told me, with a straight face, that women shouldn't work morning drive (from 5:00 a.m. until 10:00 a.m., the most lucrative time slot for air talent) because studies had shown that nobody wants to wake up to a woman's voice. Which I took to mean that hearing a girl on the radio in the morning would remind our male listeners of their unresolved stuff with Mom.

And then there was the time when I was covering an event while pregnant and a local businessman told me he was sure I was carrying a boy, because I looked happy, and every woman was happier with a little Peter inside her. He thought he was hilarious.

I swear to all the gods, I am not making this stuff up.

Which is why I believe Dr. Ford and Ms. Ramirez. I believe any women -- and any men -- who didn't come forward when the thing happened, 20 or 30 or 40 years ago, because they were embarrassed or too young or didn't think anyone would believe them, or maybe they did tell someone and weren't believed, and now some of the details are fuzzy. But the pain is seared into their souls.

I wish I didn't have to write this post. But I'm not going to shut up about this stuff. Because the only way to make it stop is for us to keep making noise.

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These moments of noisy blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

On following your own advice.

It's been a little over a year since we ran that month of #PublishingFoul coverage at Indies Unlimited. Our aim was to document the ways vanity publishers and other sleazy operators take advantage of newbie authors -- first by telling them how great their book is, in order to suck them in; then by overcharging them for editing and/or formatting services that are never delivered, or are delivered improperly; and by charging them exorbitant fees for marketing packages that never pan out.

One of the things I wanted to make sure we emphasized was that the authors are victims in these scenarios. Sure, they might have saved themselves grief if they'd done a little googling before signing a contract with one of these shysters -- but why would an author brand-new to publishing think to do that? Besides, vanity presses are run by professionals in the art of separating newbie authors from their money. They've been at it for decades. Tens of thousands of people have been taken in by these scam artists. And the shame and embarrassment they feel when they realize what's happened often keep them from telling anyone about their experience -- which then makes it easier for the scammers to perpetrate the scam on others.

Our message was this: You were taken advantage of by an expert at this stuff. You have nothing to be ashamed of. It wasn't your fault.

johnhain | Pixabay

It's good advice, and it applies in a lot of situations. Too bad it took me so long to make the connection in my own life.

True story: After my divorce, I was approached by a guy I'd met in grad school and had become friends with. He was broke with no job and needed a place to stay; I had a mostly-empty basement and told him he could move into it. I'll admit I was interested in being more than friends -- so I let him cook in my kitchen, borrow my car, bring his kid over on weekends. I loaned him money that he never paid back.

This went on for quite a while. Eventually he began to say things that undermined my sense of self-worth. I walked too heavily. I talked too much. What I did for a living (I was still in broadcast news at the time) didn't make any sense to him. I didn't treat his stuff with respect -- never mind that he had broken several of my things and neither apologized nor offered to replace them.

Once, I tried to work with him to set some house rules, and he told me point-blank that he wouldn't follow them.

Another time, he said to me, "What can I say to convince you I'm not an asshole?" The perfect retort, of course, would have been, There's nothing you can say -- but if you stopped acting like an asshole, that would be a big help. But the thing was, I had never thought of the possibility that he was an asshole until he said it.

At last, at a point where my life had completely fallen apart -- my mother had been sick with cancer, I'd lost my job and was about to lose my house -- I discovered he didn't care for me at all. Never had. And he claimed he had no idea I had been interested in him.

I sold the house partly because I couldn't think of any other way to get him to leave.

Anyway, the whole thing was humiliating. I came out of it questioning my judgment so harshly that I didn't dare to even think of dating anyone.

That was eighteen years ago. Over the years, I've recognized that I was verbally and emotionally abused by him. But it wasn't until a couple of weeks ago that I made the connection between "I was victimized" and "I have nothing to be ashamed of."

Who knows why it took so long? After all, it was staring me right in the face: Why would he suggest that I thought he was an asshole unless he knew he was behaving like one?

Anyway, I'm now certain that I was not the only woman he ever took advantage of. I believe he was an expert at manipulating people to get what he wanted, and he took advantage of me. And as we said last year to the authors who'd been taken advantage of by scammy publishers, there's no shame in that.

Hence, this post. And I hope it helps someone figure things out more quickly than I did.

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These moments of cautionary yet shame-free blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.