(This is one of a series of posts about my estranged son, Daniel.)

I began writing about Daniel as I explained earlier (https://115journals.com/2014/02/08/writing-about-daniel/) because I wanted to “open the flow of my dammed up love for him” in view of the fact that we are not communicating. I talked about his birth, his unknowable infant self and considered the external world and its influence on him as a toddler. In the process, I have arrived at the spring of 1963  when he was 15 months-old. So how is it going so far?

Unexpectedly.

I thought I would gradually uncover the little person he was then and slowly move forward as he became his own person, distinct from his sister who was a year older. Instead, something else happened.

Out of the dusty attic of my mind, I retrieved another memory. It was of my father, leaning close to my ear as he was leaving after a visit, and whispering to me. He said, “You know I’m going to kill them both, don’t you? I’ve told you so.” Then he sniggered and got into his car.

By the time, Daniel was a year old I had heard this more than once. My father was a monster. Goes without saying. We all pretended this was not so. He was violent and abusive when the fit took him, but he genuinely loved children, especially these grandchildren. Unfortunately, his idea of love was way off-base as I knew from experience and I had warned him to keep his hands off Julia and Daniel. This was his revenge.

So why not report him to the police? The most I had ever been able to do was report him to a neighbour when I was eight. She was a pillar of the community, but her intervention consisted of scolding him soundly, with the result that I thought he was going to murder me, my mother, and my two baby sisters. Moreover, he always seemed to have the local cops in his pocket and, anyway, in those days, no one- nobody- believed such allegations.

I had assured him that if anything happened to my children I would write down everything he had ever done to us, mail it to the powers that be and kill myself. His giggling response was, “You’d never do that!”.”Wait and see,” I said. (We hadn’t yet learned to say “Try me”.)

So he sniggered in my ear and took off with my mother, back to Burlington where two of my siblings still lived under his roof, too old to tempt him and old enough to have designs on escape.

I didn’t believe him, but he terrified me. He had been terrifying me for years and years. He had almost killed me when I was six, but he deeply regretted it afterwards. (Is the sarcasm clear there?) Once he understood that I opposed him, he kept up a campaign of terror, oddly or perhaps not so oddly, combined with taking me and my sister, Georgia, with him whenever possible and referring to us as his angels.

So writing about this time on Benleigh Dr. in Scarborough in 1963, I came upon this whispered confidence and lost my mind. Post traumatic stress will do that for you. Transport you right back into the thick of things. Suddenly, you are in the midst of a flashback of feeling as intense as it was originally.

Basically, I feel a homicidal rage. I feel as if I could kill him. Then I remember that he is already dead and has been for 26 years. He phoned me and my sisters on the morning of the day he died and said to each of us, “If I have done you any harm, I’m sorry” -he couldn’t get hold of Rob in Europe. He knew he was going to die and not from natural causes.

I was late for class and I muttered something in reply -“That’s all right” probably. I had spent his old age trying to love the shambling wreck he had become.

Today, weighing the harm that got passed down the generations, I told my sister Georgia that if he died violently everyday, it would not be enough. And sure, that feeling has to be acknowledged, given some head room, but I can’t stay there. I must let it go- for my own mental health. I must forgive that monstrous old man. He asked me to.

I can speculate about why Daniel won’t speak to me but I don’t really know, except that somehow this lies at the bottom of it. It is bred into us and into our relationship.

It was supposed to be a secret. Now it isn’t.

(Never Tell, my e-book tells the story of my childhood more fully. See 115journals.com)