Lancing Boils (part one)

Okay, we are going into rough water here so be fore warned, this one is not light.



June 17, 1956 Father's Day


I am 7 years old. BE (brother) is 19, JD (brother) is 15 and CA (sister) is 14. We live with our mother and father. Daddy has been feeling sick lately. BE has gone to the mountains with friends. Mama reads an ad in the paper that a local supermarket has cold watermelons on sale. We decide to go get one. JD is going to drive, but only has a learners permit so Mama has to go with him. CA says she will go in and get the melon cause Mama doesn't want to go in. Mama tells me to stay home with Daddy, but I want to go with them. Daddy says "oh let her go". I feel happy. Daddy lets me have my way alot. I am a Daddy's girl. So we go to the store and get the melon and come back home. Daddy is in the bathroom, so we go into the kitchen and cut the melon and start eating. Mama calls to Daddy and tells him if he doesn't hurry up the melon will be all gone. Finally, we become concerned about his silence. JD goes around the back of the house to look in the bathroom window and CA says "I can open the door". It has one of those little hook and eye locks and she knows how to use a knife to unlock it. So she and Mama are working on the door and I am still in the kitchen when I hear her scream and run down the hall and out the front door with Mama following close behind.


My Daddy had taken a gun into our bathroom and ended his life.

Then my memory goes black. That is my last actual memory of that day. I don't know if I followed CA andMama into the front yard or if I went down the hall to see what was wrong, but I know this, I don't have the ability to see mental pictures and I think it ended that day in 1956.


I don't know if friends or family came and got us so we didn't see the sheriff, ambulance etc. I don't know where we stayed over the next days, I just don't remember anything else at all.

My next memory is at the funeral. Mama took me up to the casket to see Daddy. There was a cloth over his upper face. Then I cried myself to sleep on Mama's lap. She woke me when it was time to go to the cemetary.

We continued to live in our house. Mama had the bathroom remodeled. I have no more real memories of that summer. Mama must have handled her grief in private. She focused on getting her children through this and back to some semblance of normal as quickly as possible.

We didn't talk about it. At least I didn't talk about it. Maybe they talked to each other, but maybe I was just too young to talk to, or maybe I was still "gone" and there was some talk that I don't remember. I think we just didn't know what to do, so we just moved through our days. I still haven't talked to my brother about it and I only recently brought up the subject with my sister. She had only slightly more memory of that day than I. I'm sure our minds simply shut down to protect us from the awful truth that had become our reality.

I must have been in some kind of shock for a very long time. I don't remember anything else about that summer. I remember returning to school that year. I was in 2nd grade and had a teacher who terrified me.

At 7 I didn't understand much of what was happening. I didn't know Mama was grieving in private. I just thought we just "got on with it". All my grief was simply pushed down and ignored. I've held it somewhere below and behind my heart, and it has taken me 51 years to bring it to the surface, so it can be opened and cleansed and begin to heal (like "lancing a boil") an emotional boil that I have kept inside for 51 years. At what cost I can only guess. I know I developed many coping skills that allowed me to function in a manner that many would consider successful. I have a good life and avoided many of the pitfalls that fatherless young girls often fall into. That said, I know there has been a cost, one paid by me and everyone in my family. All I can say is "we all did the best we could". It may seem odd in hind sight, but it was the best we could manage then. I can't even imagine the pain my mother carried and the strength she had to have to get herself and her family through the days that followed. She held us together, and that is an amazing thing.

Clicking on the publish post icon is very, very hard . . . but here goes. But if your reading this I got it done.

Okay, I wrote this post a couple days ago and have been working on editing it. After I wrote it, I felt strangely lighter the next day, colors seemed brighter, my heart felt open. My whole body felt better. But I didn't post it, and tonight I have developed soreness at the base of my throat. . .go figure. So I am going to post this now and hope that the soreness goes away. There is more to this story and I promise it does get much better.