Authors: Carine McCandless
The Wild Truth (33 page)
When I did not hear from my mother that night, I asked Robert if he thought I should drive over. “No,” he said, definitively and wisely. “I’m tired of watching them do this to you, and now to our kids.”
I’d given a lot of thought to why a resolution to my problems with my parents always seemed to reach an impasse. It reminded me of how the human body can often recover from one devastating stab wound from a clean, sharp blade—especially if the wound is tended to immediately, giving a surgeon clean and clear breaks to locate and repair. But it’s different when a body is stabbed repeatedly by a rusty, jagged blade. Even if you can stop the bleeding, if the wounds are left unattended and uncared for, they begin to fester. They become infected. The contagion kills off the parts that are needed to recover, thus leaving nothing to repair, and the body dies.
The next day, my father arrived at my home. Everyone else was at school or work, so it was just me and Christiana, but I wasn’t afraid of him. I let him in and we sat at my kitchen table. He’s always had a gift for appearing wounded and helpless whenever he’s done something particularly horrific. He said that he was going to get help. He would talk to their pastor. He said that it was only adult porn and nothing involving children. I said nothing.
He asked me to please not take his actions out on Mom and that he’d prepared a compromise. He wanted my girls to be able to come to their house for a visit alone or to stay the night—something I had already disallowed—while he stayed at the other condo or on the boat.
I recognized his wounded expression. It was the same one he’d worn the day we sat at the dining room table in Annandale, after he’d attacked me in the drunken rage that had caused me to be moved out to Windward Key.
“No,” I said.
“What?” he replied. “What do you mean ‘No’?”
“I mean exactly what I said, Dad. No.” I continued, “If you sincerely care about Mom, then walk away. You have never been able to solve your problems together. Maybe it’s time that you tried to work on things as individuals.”
And with that, I welcomed him to leave my home. My mom called the next day to tell me they had decided to separate, but I was not to tell anyone. They would live in separate condos but still attend social functions together, including worship services, because they did not want to lose their good standing at church. She sounded very excited to implement this new plan and said she felt really good about it.
“So, what do you think?” she asked.
“Did you give Dad back his laptop?” was my only question.
“Well, Carine. You know that your father manages our investments on his computer. I had to! If something had come up he couldn’t address right away, we could have gone bankrupt!”
“You have to know that’s bullshit,” I countered. “I just don’t understand why you can’t leave him, Mom.”
“Oh, Carine, because he’s your father!” With Chris no longer available to blame, I was next in line.
“Okay then, Mom, I’ll give you my opinion,” I obliged. “You have, once again, chosen your financial status and social reputation over your children, and now your grandchildren. Do not come to me for help again. I am done playing this game with you, and I refuse to install my own children as participants.” I hung up.
Thirty-six hours later, Mom called again. When I asked her if she had changed her mind, she claimed to not know what I was talking about.
Over the next few months, both of my parents avoided any direct discussion about what had happened. But I still hoped that I could help them grasp the gravity of this situation and begin some healing, separately if not together. I told them they were welcome to come by and visit as long as their behavior was appropriate. I invited them to Heather’s soccer games, and suggested that we could still have dinners together. But I had also set a firm boundary that I would never leave my daughters alone with them, for obvious reasons. All interactions would have to be on my terms. No negotiations. I told them that I would not play along with their latest perfect relationship fantasy, nor become part of the show when out in public together.
As had been their pattern, Mom and Dad began to spread rumors that I had invented the facts that surrounded our latest impasse, and claimed that I refused to allow them to see my children. If I saw them in person, they acted as if they were terribly wounded by my hurtful and disrespectful behavior.
One night, sickened by this devastating history repeating, I sat down and drafted a long impassioned letter to my parents. I apologized for sending it via email, but said that I felt it would be too stressful to deliver it personally and needed them to hear what I had to say right away. Just as Chris had done almost twenty years before me, I explained why I felt our relationship was at risk of complete disintegration. I took great care in my writing and worked hard to balance my pure and honest anger with compassion and logic:
I am very upset with you both. The fact that you have not spent any time with Heather and Christiana over the past three months is appalling to me, and even worse is that you, as usual, have twisted the facts around in your minds that somehow this is my doing, ignoring the fact that these are choices you have made through your own actions. I will try to, once again, spell this out for you. But honestly as I do this now I feel that this is an exhausting exercise, knowing that this is probably futile. You have proven that you cannot take a hard look at yourselves in the mirror, and finally accept responsibility for the choices you have made over the past forty plus years that have led your children to feel this way. You will tell yourselves and each other, and your friends, and your church, and your God, that we are all just ungrateful children that have cut you out of our families’ lives for no reason whatsoever—that you are dismayed, confused and so very hurt that we could do this to you, and that it must have something to do with money. Or you might choose to dismiss my being upset with you as a result of my “emotional state after giving birth.” Ridiculous.
I included long personal notes to each, listing incidents from our distant and recent history in a desperate attempt to connect on a level that would allow some chance of reconciliation that had seemed possible so many times before. Then my letter continued:
Now with all of those years passed, the fault lies with you both equally. You have both had plenty of opportunities to discontinue this behavior and have CHOSEN not to . . . It has always amazed me, although not surprised me, that losing Chris failed to snap you both into the reality and understanding of how our childhood, while we agree was certainly not the worst ever experienced (as you often point out), was still in fact very confusing, violent, negatively dramatic, dishonest, and stressful (which you often ignore). We have always understood and appreciated the good things you did as parents and in raising us, but somehow in your minds this cancelled out the validity of our feelings about the bad times. Any attempts by us to discuss this honestly with you, while at that moment in time seemed like a possible breakthrough, were always predictably followed up with some sarcastic comment about us being spoiled, difficult children to raise, or we just simply had a warped recollection and you certainly don’t remember it that way.
Eight children remember it that way.
Your refusal to acknowledge this, and continuation of the same dramatic negative cycle, has
pushed
your children and grandchildren away. No one expects the past to be rewritten. We just don’t want it repeated again & again & again, and we do not want it to negatively affect our own children . . .
It makes me very sad that I do not feel comfortable calling you up to tell you that Christiana’s therapy is going so well, to tell you to come over quick to see her rolling over, to hear her talking, or to see how cute she looks in her high chair eating cereal and even drinking out of a cup. You should be at Heather’s soccer games and should not have to go up to the school to give her a present.
I will end with this. Chris told me once of the five-page letter he wrote to you both, in a last desperate attempt to get you to understand his feelings. His hopes that it would be worth all of that effort—his pouring out of his soul, his dragging back into the front of his mind the things he had safely tucked away into the back—were lost, when the only response he got from you was a sarcastic postcard from a ski resort . . . That is when you lost him forever. I hope you do not make the same choice again.
Please LISTEN & SEE!!! With love & hope, Carine
Soon after, I received their reply:
Carine,
You have been uncharacteristically uncommunicative for some time now. In fact, this isolation tendency has been growing significantly for at least two years, predating our present disagreements. . . . Your belated note to us merely exacerbates an already damaging situation.
They continued on, through various forms of communication: sometimes with a peaceful and loving tone, expressing dismay over our emotional distance and protesting that I had refused their attempts to mend our relationship; other times with sarcasm and vile threats, assuring me that due to my “despicable” actions, I was ruining Christiana’s future by destroying her opportunity to inherit any of their money.
They always closed with the same sentiment—that regardless of how I was treating them, they would continue to pray for me to find my way to God’s grace in hopes that He might have mercy on my soul, and that they would be waiting with loving hearts and open arms, for me to see the error of my ways.
I looked to my faith, and into my heart. I thought about Chris and the responsibility I felt to be a survivor. But that obligation—that instinct—had shifted from my role as a daughter to my accountability as a mother and a sister.
I thought about the importance of truth.
I thought about the meaning of shared happiness.
And that is how the war came to its end.
Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine.
What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do
not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn.
—Henry David Thoreau,
Civil Disobedience
W
ITH THE WAR OVER,
it was time for the history lessons. When Christiana was able to start a full day-school program, I accepted an invitation to join the Random House Speakers Bureau. Jon’s book was now printed in more than thirty languages and had been required reading in schools across the country for over fifteen years. As I visited high schools and colleges, I saw how hungry the students were for a better understanding of Chris. They wanted to know what drove him to the decisions he made. Teachers and professors wanted to provide their students with a personal connection to Chris’s life and death, so that his triumphs and his mistakes could be more than words in a book. I realized early on that something simple blocked that connection: the students didn’t have the whole story.
I had helped perpetuate misunderstandings about Chris’s life. I felt guilty that I hadn’t been stronger and more willing to let Jon tell the whole truth from the beginning. But in gentler moments, I remembered I was only twenty-one when I met Jon and still hopeful that my relationship with my parents would take a different course. Chris had taught me to learn not only from their mistakes but also from my own. The important thing was that I tell the whole truth now.
From working with students and from the messages I received about Chris from people all over the world, I came to understand that his legacy could do so much more to help people if its primary focus was based on that which was most important to Chris: TRUTH—a word he’d carefully written in large block letters in one of his beloved books. Now I speak honestly about my part in hiding much of that truth. I have worked hard to forgive myself for that infraction, while fully examining the reasons that I did so and why I can do so no longer.
At the end of every lecture presentation, after every Q&A session, I can always count on at least one student straggling behind, waiting for the others to get their final questions answered. I always allow this last student to approach at his or her own pace while I pack up slowly. Perhaps the most powerful of these meetings happened on a visit to Westfield High School, the largest in Virginia, in the same town where Chris and I grew up.
“Excuse me, Ms. McCandless?” The young man’s eyes finally met mine. “Umm . . . I just wanted to thank you for being so honest with us.”
“Of course,” I replied, looking into a young face carrying a familiar burden.
“I’m dealing with the same thing at home.” We spoke for a while about his own struggles as a member of an abusive household. New occurrences like this kept domestic violence a part of my life, but now it was on my terms.
“Umm . . . just one last thing.” He paused for a while, clearly gearing up to ask me something important. “I was wondering . . . have you ever been able to forgive your parents?”
I had spoken to thousands of students over the past several years. It was not the most personal question I had ever been asked, but it was by far the most difficult. And I was not sure that I could give him an honest answer, because I was still trying to figure that one out for myself.
I struggle with the definition of forgiveness. I debate with myself as to whether it is a matter of compassion, of understanding, or of simply being willing and able to forget. But with forgetfulness comes recurrence. I wrestle with my faith, which instructs me to show mercy to those who have not asked for it and pardon those who have not earned it. As painful and complicated as it is, the conflict dissipates when I look at my children. I know in my heart and soul that my primary responsibilities—above all else—are to protect them and to teach them. Through any adversity, against all odds, and until my last breath, I will measure myself on how well I serve this purpose.
As a mom, I’ve often used something I call the “Billie check” when struggling to control my anger and frustration. My mom rarely raised her hands to us as Dad did, but she was just as scary. Recently I came home after a grueling work week and noticed that Heather had yet to pick up her wet towel from the bathroom floor, she’d gotten mascara on the white counter, and the mortar-like remnants of a fruit smoothie sat in a glass on the back of the toilet. I could feel myself boiling over as I heard the TV on in the family room and pictured her sprawled out on the couch in front of it.
This is typical teenage stuff,
I said to myself as I did the Billie check.
Don’t take your anger—about taking on more work than you have time for, about your lack of sleep, about how long it’s been since
you
had time to sit in front of the TV—out on your daughter.