By Muriel Lipke

Part One

Shortly after I moved to San Francisco in 2004 I received a phone call from an uncle on my biological father’s side of the family telling me that my paternal grandfather had died. I remember sitting at my desk and asking my uncle if he had called to tell me anything else. When he said “no” I hung up the phone without even saying goodbye. I didn’t feel sad, I didn’t cry – why would I? My grandfather, along with my father sexually abused me from the age of four until the age of thirteen. I hadn’t even seen the man since I was 18, when I confronted them both as part of my therapy, demanding that they admit what they had done to me as a child.

For that matter, I hadn’t seen father-dearest since I was 23 when he told me that I was an “ungrateful child” whom he regretted was ever born. That was around about the time that I was in the middle of my first and only divorce – having married a man a few years previous who was just as abusive as my father was. I think that my father liked my ex-husband better than me because he saw himself in him. I know I saw father-dearest in my ex and that horrified and frightened me so much that I could barely move. Getting out of that marriage was the first step in many that I took for myself in order to get well.

Or, at least be better than I was.

Deciding to not have contact with the people who abused me and/or facilitated that abuse was the second.

So father-dearest got banned.

My boyfriend of several years was laying on our bed reading a book when I got the news of the old man’s passing. As I put the phone down in its cradle he asked me, “What was that about?”

“My grandfather died,” I said with no emotion in my voice what-so-ever, “You know – the one – who did those things… he died.”

“Good riddance,” he said, “Are you okay?”

My boyfriend was (is) a social worker and he’d been maintaining since he had met me that he thought I was suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder due to my abuse as a child. I probably was, in addition to suffering from the clinical depression and anxiety that I knew about already, but I was stubbornly resisting going back into therapy. I thought that my work there was done after several years of weekly therapy (five years previous) and a drug regimen. I considered my “issues” compartmentalized and put away where they appropriately belonged and wanted to get on with the business of living my life without having the stigma of mental illness – situational or genetic – tacked onto me.

“Yeah, I’m fine.” I said.

That night I had to take a sleeping pill for the first time in a year so I could fall asleep. I am and was a restless sleeper. That night my inability to fall asleep was particularly bad. But, after an Xanex I eventually drifted off.

I dreamed that I was back in the house my Mother and I had lived in before she divorced father-dearest. I was five when we moved out of that house, so it’s rather remarkable to me that I remembered it in such detail in my dream. It seemed to be my birthday. I was my actual chronological age in the dream – 30 – but, I was dressed in a frilly party dress that I remember from a photo of my fourth birthday party. There was a party going on behind me, my friends and family were all there, celebrating. However when I turned around, towards the front of the house, I got tunnel vision and saw that my grandfather and father-dearest were sitting together on a plaid sofa in front of a bay window. I could see through the window that it was snowing outside. I turned to go back into the party and saw that the area behind me where all these protectors – my Mom, my brothers, my uncles, my maternal grandparents, my boyfriend (who shouldn’t have been in a dream where I was four, as I’d only known him for a few years) – had disappeared. The room had turned cold and grey and it seemed as if the walls were crumbling down.

I tried to wake myself up, saying over and over again that it was just a dream, to no avail. Then like by black magic, something grabbed me around my waist and pulled me towards that plaid couch, until I was standing right in front of father-dearest and my paternal grandfather. Father-dearest stood up and looked down at me with his eyes filled with anger and hate – it was a scary look – sadly, not one I was unaccustomed to. He pushed me onto my knees in front of my grandfather, keeping his hand on my shoulder so I couldn’t get up. My paternal grandfather looked at me, then leaned forward to hiss at me in his whiskey and liverwurst scented breath, “You’ll never escape me!”

I tried to scream, I couldn’t – I tried to get away, I couldn’t – I begged him to let me be, he wouldn’t. Then father-dearest forced my head down onto the couch and sat down on top of me. I was suffocating and screaming and crying and begging for my Mom to wake me up…

The next thing I knew my boyfriend was shaking me awake, but it wasn’t as if I had left the dream, only that he was there with me. I was terrified and it took me several minutes to recognize that we were not in my old house, but my new apartment in San Francisco. I still wasn’t convinced that father-dearest and my grandfather weren’t waiting around the corner to hurt me – I made my boyfriend get up and search the apartment, armed with my tennis racket. I followed close behind him and once we’d cleared all the rooms I allowed him to put me back to bed and feed me another sedative. Though I made him promise that he’d stay awake until I fell asleep to protect me.

I was completely irrational. Because I was sick, I was always sick, I just didn’t want to admit it — because, let’s face it, who wants to be mentally ill? My own mental illness was mild in comparison to my brothers – he was a full blown voice hearing and hallucination seeing schizophrenic – and where I could recognize his illness and advocate for him with doctors and lawyers and the general public, I could not admit my own disease or advocate for myself.

The next morning my boyfriend told me that I had woken him up because I had punched the wall next to our bed and was screaming at the top of my lungs. I had no memory of that what-so-ever, although my right hand was bruised and swollen. It was then that he put his foot down and told me that if I wouldn’t go get help for myself that he couldn’t continue to be in a relationship with me.

Given that my boyfriend was (and is) the love of my life, that was a powerful motivator and about a week later I went to San Francisco Mental Health Access where I was hooked up with a therapist and a psychiatrist and put back onto the medications that I had worked so hard to wean myself off (under the care of a different doctor) years previously.

Part 2 & 3 coming soon!