Uncle Don built an apartment for us in the basement. The four of us lived there while Daddy was in Vietnam—Mommy, my brother and sister, and me. It was an actual apartment—no trace of basement left. Daddy called Mommy on the phone regularly. The connection was always bad, which meant loud talking, even yelling, while they tried to hear each other. Mommy never seemed happy after the calls.
We mailed cassette tapes back and forth. On one such tape, Mommy recorded me playing piano. Daddy scolded me on his return tape, telling me there was no need to play the piano perfectly. “Play for fun,” he said. I missed him. Before he left, he promised, “I’ll be home. Don’t worry.”
I felt something was wrong when we started watching TV to watch soldiers get off the planes—home from Vietnam. Ted, Daddy’s buddy and our neighbor, came home, but no Daddy. Night after night, we looked, but Daddy never got off one of those planes.
The barely contained feelings in the house felt like holding my breath underwater, my lungs almost bursting before that next breath. These feelings continued as we ate lunch one afternoon. Mommy sniffled and tried not to cry. No one talked. When I heard a knock on the door upstairs, I looked up. I could see two men through the window. Mommy saw them too and wailed, “Nooooo!” She ran out the door. I got up to run after her. My aunt grabbed my arm and barked, “No!” I wrenched my arm free and ran out the door, chasing Mommy.
I found her in the woods, sitting on a giant fallen tree, sobbing deep, gut-wrenching sobs. I don’t remember anything else, but years later, Mom said the soldiers had to come into the woods and find her—tell her straight to her face that Daddy was dead. It’s a military policy.
I remember the funeral. I was the only kid allowed to attend. I felt special. I was five years old. It was a military funeral—an American flag draped over the casket. When I was older, Mom told me she went to lots of funerals as a kid and had a practice of touching the hands of the dead to verify they had truly passed. She couldn’t do this with Daddy because his body had already started to decompose. Her brother did it in her stead.
I sat on Mommy’s lap next to the casket. Soldiers stood at the ready with guns. The man in charge told us not to take our eyes off the flag on the casket. Afraid to get shot, I stared at the flag until my eyes burned. Eventually, I couldn’t look anymore. I looked away, and when nothing happened, I curiously watched the proceedings. Soldiers fired their weapons in a 21-gun salute, and trumpets played Taps. Even today, hearing Taps transports me back to my mother’s lap at the funeral.
As a child, I didn’t understand what was happening. I knew Mommy was sad, everyone was sad, and Daddy was dead, and we were having a reunion back at the house. After the funeral, I don’t remember anything but playing with the other kids. I drank coffee for the first time and ran around like a hellion.
My views on death are immature. Death still means someone permanently moved out of town. I feel sad and cry. It’s not like the movies, though. I don’t lay around all day, unable to move.
Daddy’s death changed our lives. We didn’t leave West Virginia. During the war, Mommy moved back because she was pregnant and needed help taking care of two kids, almost three, by herself. We stayed for the same reason—support.
After Daddy died, Mommy rented a house a couple of miles down the road from my uncle. It was next door to a deacon from our church. Four houses stood in a row. Kids lived in everyone. My friend lived in the third house. Carla was her name. “You have to watch out for Uncle Buck,” Carla said. That’s what we called him, Uncle Buck.
Uncle Buck sexually abused me. He said, “Don’t tell anyone. This is our little secret. If you tell anyone, something bad will happen to your mother.” Keeping sexual abuse a secret made me feel like being a bad secret agent and not telling my family. He couldn’t have made a scarier threat. I’d just lost my father to war. I didn’t want to be an orphan. So, I kept silent. Eventually, I cracked.
As my new step-father and family prepared to move into the house my parents still live in, I told on him. I don’t remember the conversation; it’s funny that I don’t when keeping silent was such a big deal. I remember returning a skillet to his house. I went to the front door, which we never did, and handed his wife, Louise, a pan. In a shrill voice, Louise said, “See what you’ve done? Give me that,” and slammed the door in my face. Blame the victim, even a child. It’s what we do.
Years later, my boyfriend and I paid Uncle Buck a visit at 2 a.m. Drunk. I told him how angry I was that he molested me. That he ruined my life. Louise was a witness. My boyfriend screamed, “You’re going to burn in Hell! You’re going to burn!” Over and over. I grew up in the Bible Belt. It’s burn-in-Hell territory. The next day, Louise called and told my Mom to tell me to stop harassing them.
More years passed and a different boyfriend wanted to make signs and put them up and down the street where he lived. Uncle Buck is a child molester. Uncle Buck is a child molester. I wouldn’t let him. Maybe Uncle Buck was trained by his own abuser. Perhaps he is plagued by the same PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) symptoms that plague me. I decided in high school that something terrible must have happened to him, too. It’s not an excuse. It’s an explanation.
I dredge up the past—analyzing and rehashing it like a gold digger sifting through sand looking for that one gold nugget, only I’m looking for a cure. I attempted suicide the first time at eleven—a cry for help. If I wanted to die, you would be reading a different essay.
“Write what you know,” they say, but no one wants to read what I know. I shared what I wrote in a writing class years ago—my story masquerading as fiction. Looking back, I think I believed that if I exposed the truth, I would be healed. This theory didn’t pan out. I could have interpreted the visceral reaction of my classmates as a compliment to my writing skills, but I didn’t. “It’s such a stereotype. I don’t believe it. It isn’t real,” one classmate said venomously. The teacher told me, “A little sexual abuse goes a long way.” I never forgot that.
Every time I write, I wind up here—darkness from the past stalks me like a hunter with silent footsteps. I’m obsessed. I need to tell, be heard, and share how it changed me. I don’t reach out because I want to but because I must. It can’t be cruel happenstance.
Harry Emerson Fosdick said, “Hating people is like burning down your own house to get rid of a rat.” His words changed me. I need forgiveness. The hate ate at me—taking bite after bite, day after day, like a parasite eating my flesh from the inside out. PTSD symptoms plagued me—watching movies in my mind reenacting the whole sordid thing, feeling Uncle Buck’s breath on my neck during sex with my husband, taking alternate routes home because I thought someone was following me, sitting at my kitchen table with a butcher knife waiting for Him, and delusions, bad relationships, emotional pain, and doubt. No one wants to talk about it—like your crazy uncle who left for Vietnam, a charmed boy with a winning, quarterback attitude and returned a raging, abusive alcoholic, destroyed by the things he’d seen and done. These are sad, whisper-behind-your-hand stories, but stories like mine must be told.
I wrote Uncle Buck a letter when I was 25. “You sexually abused me,” I said. “You hurt me. You can’t make it right,” I cried as I typed. I screamed on the page, “You violated my body. I know you know who I am even though I won’t sign my name. I can’t forgive you.” Then I stopped writing and sat looking at the monitor. I realized I had to forgive. My house was burning down. I wrote. “I know you must be in pain too. My wish is that you get help and break the chain. I guess I do forgive you and hope you find peace.” I meant it.
A month later, he wrote back. He signed his full name. There was no return address. He wrote the wrong building number. How did his letter find me? The letter said, “I received your letter and wish to apologize for any pain I caused. I wish for you the same peace you wish for me.” Uncle Buck is dead now. I’m glad we got to make peace of a sort.
The haunting didn’t stop, but it lessened. When I stopped keeping the secret, I progressed. The symptoms never leave me entirely. Sometimes, after I talk about it with a fellow sufferer, I feel him there again—breathing. It’s part of me—like the lead in my friend Susan’s eye when she was poked with a pencil in elementary school.
I thought the goal was to patch up my injured self so I couldn’t feel her inside me anymore. But I can never be un-sexually abused. Denying is holding on. If I break my leg, my leg is always a healed broken leg—no longer the leg I had before the break. I may need help to walk. At first, I needed an emotional walker—unable to get around on my own steam. I was battered and full of self-loathing. Now, I walk unaided. All that’s left is a slight limp. It’s more progress than I could have hoped for.
The good things in my life are a direct result of clawing my way out of the torment that abuse caused me. Today, I am in love with my husband. Don’t think I’m a stellar picture of emotional health. He’s my third husband. But I know I’ve got it right now. He knows it all. My friends and family love me as I am—no improvements necessary.
I realize without sexual abuse, I wouldn’t be the woman I am today. I like her. Other men and women with the same experience wouldn’t gravitate toward me. I like strong people—survivors and underdogs. We find each other.
I don’t want to make you uncomfortable. I’m reaching out. Not all my fellow sufferers have a voice, nor a writer monkey on their back who won’t stop with their monkey noises until the story is told. I have a message for you if you were also injured. You aren’t alone. Don’t give up. Hope lives.
(Names have been changed.)