283: What if you saved your family from annihilation?
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This Is Actually Happening features real experiences that often include traumatic events. Please consult the show notes for specific content warnings on each episode and for more information about support services. I had this duality to my personality where I was partly aware something was wrong deep inside of me. There was this monster back home. There was always this feeling of over my shoulder somewhere, there's this terror, this existential threat.

From Wondery, I'm Witt Misseldein. You're listening to This Is Actually Happening. Episode 283. What if you saved your family from annihilation?

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My dad's parents were very strict. His dad worked for the IRS for a little while. He was raised by his siblings who were not very nice to him. And in return, I think he was pretty mean to his younger brothers. My mom was born in Pittsburgh, but her family moved to California when she was young.

Her side of the family, since they're in California, they were the ones we mostly saw on holidays and family gatherings. And I love them. They're like the funnest people and they're so loving. I was never very close with them, unfortunately, because my parents always kept us very isolated. And even though we were around them a few times a year, my brothers and I were mostly too afraid to talk to any of them. I don't know much because my parents would not talk about their childhoods.

My parents met in a cult. They traveled the U.S. giving sermons. My mom was the leader of this group that would travel, and my dad was moving up in the organization. The way my mom tells it, she hated my dad at first, and she kept trying to kick him out of the group, but he just wouldn't leave. And finally he grew on her, and they got together.

They eventually got married in a mass wedding. I think they said like 25 other couples got married at the same time. They've told me they've traveled to almost all 50 states and they would just stay in each state for six months to a year. They would eat rabbit and live on communes. I know it was Christian. I've heard some of their beliefs. I've heard my dad try and preach to other people.

From what I've gathered, it's some pretty crazy stuff. My parents tried to get us to talk in tongues sometimes when we were kids. I didn't know any context because they didn't teach us any of the religion. They would just tell me to mumble and speak gibberish. And that was me talking with God. So that was how I talked with God when I was a kid. But my brothers and I weren't raised in their religion, thank God, because my dad was trying to move up in the cult. And he thought that he deserved a place high up.

but they passed him up for a promotion. And so he gave up his religion. My brothers and I translate that into he never really believed in the religion. My dad just wanted to move up in life. That was a chance for him to move up. When he finally realized that he couldn't succeed, he quit. For him, it was just a tool.

But my mom was a hardcore believer. And so there's this weird dynamic where she really believed this stuff. And I believe she looked up to him because my dad pretended to be this super knowledgeable preacher in their Christian cult. But he quit the cult. He made my mom quit. They got out, got regular jobs. He washed his hands clean of it and everything he believed, he never spoke of again.

I had a very formal relationship with my parents, just like my parents had with their parents. You had to respect your parents and you had to obey them. My dad just had so much rage inside of him. And he had this one personality when he was out in the world. He had a totally different personality when he was home. He wouldn't let any of his feelings out. He wouldn't let anyone know if he was unhappy, uncomfortable. He was always the super jolly old guy to everyone that met him.

And then when he came home or just even out of view, would be at the store and he'd just step behind the clothing rack or something. And my dad would just start hitting me because he just couldn't control himself. In my house, he would start to hit my mom because she would make a joke or something or she would disagree with him. That was always really bad. You know, if he was in the wrong mood, he would start hitting her. And I remember like me and my brothers would go in the kitchen sometimes and pull him off of her because he just couldn't stop.

I remember the feeling of knowing that my dad could kill me. I remember thinking he might not stop. The event that probably defines my childhood has to do with the ice cream man. I think I was around like nine years old. We were being babysat, my two brothers and I, and I convinced the babysitter to let me use my allowance to buy ice cream for my brothers and a couple friends that happened to be outside.

I was nine years old. I was stoked to get ice creams. We never did that. And so I bought ice creams for everyone. We all ate them. It was great. At night, my parents came home, talked to the babysitter. Babysitter mentions the ice cream incident. Yeah, my parents' faces just drop. And they let her go. They pay her. She goes. Something's definitely wrong. And I just remember being terrified because I knew that, look, something was wrong and someone's going to pay for it.

My dad explained to us that the ice cream man is the devil and we are not allowed to buy ice cream from them. And what I did was really wrong. My older brother had the biggest consequence, even though it wasn't him that bought the ice cream, wasn't his idea, wasn't even his money. My dad beat him with a belt so badly in front of me and my mom and my younger brother because he should have known better and he should have stopped me.

My older brother was kind of the whipping boy when I was a kid and often took most of the abuse. So for the rest of my childhood, I was terrified of the ice cream truck. We would leave when it came down the street. It made me nervous hearing about it. Later on in life, I finally realized what was actually happening. What my parents really were saying was, the ice cream man is not white. You're not allowed to buy anything from him because my dad was incredibly racist.

Not outwardly, you would never know. No one knew. Only us in the family knew because he hid everything. But that was kind of it. You know, there was this outward appearance to everyone else that everything was okay. The babysitter didn't know anything was wrong. But internally, we were subject to insane rages for crazy reasons. And sometimes we would do something awful and nothing would happen. And there was just no knowing when you did something right and when you did something wrong.

But we were all really smart kids. And so that was the other problem was, you know, we saw things for what they were. And so telling this kid, smart kid, the ice cream man is the devil. I knew he wasn't the devil, but how do I reconcile that? I could see how things worked. And yet I was told these fantasies and forced to believe them in my own mortal peril if I didn't believe them.

Not only do I have to believe it, I have to convince these people I believe it. So I have to act as if this is the reality that I live in. I was imprisoned in my own mind. I didn't feel like I would ever be able to get out of it. And so I kind of had in private, I could be who I was when I'm by myself.

It was maddening. I think that's where a lot of my depression came from. And I remember distinctly the depression got worse later on in the day when it got close to the time that my dad got home from work. But even when he wasn't around, I was so afraid that anyone would report to my dad that I disobeyed him. I was very scared. I was so scared at school. I was so afraid to have my teachers report to my dad or my parents that I did anything wrong.

I was afraid of people. I was afraid of everybody because I thought everybody had this right to my body. I didn't feel like I owned my body. I felt like everyone else owned me and I needed to do what I could to not force them to do something to me. I had to always be okay, had to always be in control of things. I learned how to make sure everyone around me was okay with things.

I just learned how to control the people around me. I learned how to relate to anybody. I learned how to be very manipulative. Middle school was probably the worst time of my life. I wasn't picked on. It's not like people made fun of me or anything like that. I just feel like I was in the shadow. I used to walk between the classrooms during recess and lunch because I was so afraid of getting caught with no friends.

I made some friends that helped me blend in enough that I survived without getting picked on or without getting noticed. But it was just terrifying. And I remember every passing period, every recess, every lunch, the scariest part of my day was having to go outside and see these kids talking to each other and having fun and trying to figure out what I'm going to do for seven or 30 minutes and just not get noticed. I was terrified of all the other kids.

But I went to high school and I don't really know what happened. All of a sudden, I just flourished. It was the weirdest thing, but I started being able to talk to people. I started feeling more comfortable. I started liking passing periods. Part of it was looking up to my older brother, who was my role model. You know, my older brother was the coolest kid in school. Like everyone loved him. He was a great guy. And so I kind of mimicked him and that helped me.

The ways that my dad would abuse us. He always did it in a way that no one could find out. Everything was always behind t-shirts, never would hit us in the face, never in the forearm, never anywhere that a t-shirt wouldn't hide. A couple years ago, my mom brought up that she watched the Ted Bundy documentary and was like, you know, it's so weird because they said some things that reminded me of your father.

And we all had watched this documentary and we hadn't put it all together. And we started talking about it and we realized, yeah, like Ted Bundy is the closest person I could relate to my dad. That is how my dad felt. That's how he acted. But, you know, and those guys usually didn't lose their cool until they meant to. And that's how it felt with my dad. You know, he would go out of his way to manipulate everyone around us. I actually worked with my dad. I had my first job with him.

He was the manager of this hardware store and everybody there loved my dad. They didn't just say that because I was his son. He was this amazing person to them. Like I saw it firsthand. Like I would have loved the guy. People would come up to me and tell me what an awesome guy my dad was. And he's so nice and how he did this thing and took care of them or helped him through the situation. And I just, you know, and I went along with it. He didn't love us at home, but at work we were amazing people.

He had pictures of us on his desk at work, but he didn't have any pictures of us at home. We were definitely part of his credibility. I remember specifically doing things and reporting them to my dad so he could go tell his coworkers to make himself look good. And I knew that's why he was doing it. I knew it wasn't because he actually was proud of me or he loved me. I knew I was just giving him ammo and I did it just because I was still so stuck.

I think when I was 14, I started working out. I wasn't trying to look good for girls. I wasn't trying to get strong. After doing it for a while, I realized it made me stronger than my dad. I started realizing I'm taller, I'm bigger, I'm stronger. And I started feeling a little more in control of my situation. One of the most traumatizing things that ever happened to me happened when I was 14.

I had my second girlfriend. One day I just wanted to see her. And I knew my parents wouldn't let me. I think they said no already. So my dad walks in the door from work. He walks in, sets his briefcase down. And by the time he walks into the kitchen, we've already argued in a few seconds. He walks straight into me and just starts punching me wildly. And I took my lashings and I was happy because that's what I wanted to happen.

So then I got sent to my room. They sat down for dinner. I was in my room and I ran away to go see my girlfriend. I planned it. That's what I wanted to happen. I expected my dad to beat me and send me to my room and then they wouldn't check on me for a couple hours so I could go run away and see my girlfriend. And it worked, except by the time I got to my girlfriend's house, my parents showed up in their car. I had my girlfriend. She ended up calling the police. Police came over.

And then my dad was so good at talking to people, he convinced the police that the bruises on my arms, it was my brother's, that we had been fighting at the house. So the police took me home. We got home. The police let me out. And my mom pulled me aside. She's asking me, like, what's wrong? Why would you do this? Why would you bring the police in? Don't you know that he has a record now? She was so concerned about my dad.

That was the most shame I have ever felt because of what I did to my dad. That was the one and only time any of us kids ever did anything public. The abuse stopped the day that I ran away. After that day, my dad never talked about me running away. He saw me as the one person who's willing to go tell other people.

Once I did that, you know, it broke that whole grip that he had on me. And I may not have been attacked by him after that day, but I still had a paralyzing fear of him. My mom, I always felt like she loved me and my brothers. She never showed it. She never said it. She was abused too. You know, she was too scared to do anything.

But she also had this belief that you support your husband no matter what. And she was able to just disconnect in her head the fact that he's hitting us. And so my mom always stood by him. Even when he attacked her, you know, she would apologize to him for whatever she said to cause him to attack her. She thought she was being a good wife. My brothers and I thought that my mom agreed with everything that he did because she always stood by him.

And even though my mom never hit us, I consider her complicit because she was there and didn't stop it. Today's episode is brought to you by Quince. It's been a busy season of events and travel, and my wardrobe has taken a beating. A total overhaul isn't in my budget, but I'm replacing some of those worn-out pieces with affordable, high-quality essentials from Quince. By partnering with Top Factories, Quince cuts out the cost to the middleman and passes the savings on to us.

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As soon as we turned 18, we got the hell away from my dad. I graduated high school and went straight to college. And college is where I became myself. I loved school. Like, I burned through all of my federal aid money before I graduated because I took too many units every year. I started learning French. I studied a year abroad in France. And I feel very lucky that I had that opportunity.

Around college was when I started referring to my childhood as this perfect childhood. You know, I had two brothers, parents that are married and still together. They love each other. My family is close. And so I had this perfect childhood. But I had this duality to my personality where I was partly aware something was wrong deep inside of me.

There was this monster back home. There was always this feeling of over my shoulder somewhere, there's this terror, this existential threat. The way that I thought and the way that I felt were two totally different things. They were not connected. I thought happy all the time. You know, I was always super optimistic, super happy-go-lucky. People saw me very positive. I thought everything was good. I thought I was always so lucky.

But, you know, emotionally, my life was wrecked. I would look really happy, be really outgoing and friendly and fun. And then I would go home and suffer through my depression alone. I wouldn't let other people see that. I just couldn't handle myself. I just thought it was normal. I thought it was normal that your dad attacked you and blamed shit on you and and hated you and that you were supposed to love him back for that. I thought that was normal.

I can live in these dualities. I can live knowing something is wrong, but convincing myself it's okay because that's what my childhood was like. After college, I get into a really bad depression because I don't know what I'm going to do next. I had all these prospects and I was too depressed to actually follow through on any of them. And I moved back in with my parents. I was running a lot to stay in shape and I had knee pain.

And so my dad started giving me his painkillers. I think he was prescribed 900 a month back when doctors were prescribed for just asking for it. Because that's literally what I did. I got hooked on them, went to my doctor who was my dad's doctor, said, hey, those help my knee problem. Can I get a bunch? And I had a prescription the next day. And I went through this wonderful period of being hooked on drugs for like three years. But I just couldn't get by. I didn't know what was wrong with me. I thought I just really liked drugs.

I would take like 20 to 30 painkillers a day, do lots of other illicit drugs on top of that. I had to call an ambulance on myself a couple times to go to the hospital just because I was afraid I was going to die. I was taking so much drugs I didn't feel anything. I would get beat up a lot at bars because I would get really messed up and then I would talk a lot of shit to people. I was losing my friends, I was talking to people less, I was staying in more.

I went through this phase of getting lower and lower and lower in my life. And one day I decided I want to love again. I want to feel love. I don't feel anything. And so I decided I need to get clean. And I did. I went cold turkey, got clean. Six months later, I met my wife and found someone to love. I idolized my wife.

She is the person that I could never be. She's awesome with boundaries. She's great at telling people, no, I learned from her, but I think she also protects me. She helped me see what I was going through. I wasn't even aware of how anxious I was and we were prone to argue. And that on top of my debilitating anxiety helped show me that I needed help.

My wife was very supportive with that. I started therapy in my early 30s just to deal with anxiety. I had no clue what the cause was. I walked in saying I'm anxious and I assumed she was going to give me some breathing exercises or something or talk about how stressful work is. And we ended up talking about my childhood a lot, which I thought was ridiculous because why would that have anything to do with my anxiety? For like six months, I'm going to therapy and nothing changes.

And then one day my therapist asked me to talk about, you know, I'm playing hockey on my street after school and she's asking me to describe it. And I'm like, okay, so you're having fun playing hockey. And then my dad comes home, you know, and then I get sad because I hate it when my dad comes home. And she said, well, why do you hate it? And I said, well, everyone hates it when their dad comes home. And she said, why do you think that? And I said, cause it's true. Up till this point, I had been telling my therapist, I had been telling her I had the perfect childhood.

I had told her none of the abuse at that point. Anyways, we finished therapy. I go home and the first thing I tell my wife is, didn't you hate it when your dad came home from work? You know, she's caught off guard. She's like, no, I loved it. My dad was awesome. It was so much fun. And that started the spiral of just realizations of, oh my God, this is not normal.

I finally started talking to my family and I found out my brothers were pretty quick to get on board. And I was really happy and surprised to see that they were able to recognize that it was abuse, that it was not okay. I was afraid that they might be stuck in it like we had been, thinking it was okay.

Talking to my brothers about all the things that happened in our childhood, it was so freeing to say what happened and to hear them acknowledge it. I felt like I stepped out of the prison walls. All of a sudden, I existed in this world again. Things were real. There was no insanity. There was no fantasy that my dad created. And I felt so good that my brothers were with me on that.

Pretty much since the day I asked my wife if she hated it when her dad came home, my life has been an unraveling. It started happening very fast. It wasn't hard for me to accept. I didn't struggle with it. It was like the opposite. It was just like I could breathe easy. Everything came to me. Like, you know, I would imagine like a writer having severe writer's block and then all of a sudden it just goes away. It's like this epiphany feeling of, wow, wow.

In my late 20s, my mom starts getting sick. My wife and I are starting to notice that my mom's acting a little different. And at one point, my dad calls and says that they woke up and my mom was having trouble. She couldn't move and she was struggling. And so he took her to the hospital. A doctor came and couldn't figure out what it was. So they sent her home. And then she gets better and she's fine.

We started noticing really weird interactions between my dad and my mom. Like one time we're at my parents' house and a board falls on my mom's hand and her hand really swells up like way bigger than normal. We don't know what's going on. And my dad makes it a point to parade this around to us individually and

He doesn't go like take my mom to the hospital. He doesn't come to all of us and say, look what's happening. Let's do something. He goes to me and my brothers individually and shows us my mom's hand saying, look at this terrible thing. And she won't go to the doctor, blah, blah, blah, blaming her that, you know, she's hurt. She won't do anything about it. My mom's just scared shitless. She won't say anything. And me and my wife, she doesn't like my dad. She knows something's off with him. We're just like, why won't you take her to the hospital?

So finally, I get my brothers together. We're all up front of the house. We're all talking. My mom's hand is huge. Dad, why won't you bring her to the doctor? And he just keeps saying, she won't let me. She won't let me. My mom's just standing there. Finally, we convince him to go. Find out later on, okay, she's fine. She's taken care of. Great. We move on. Well, like two weeks later, my mom woke up and she couldn't move. She was completely paralyzed. We find out she's got Guillain-Barre syndrome, which is where you can't move your body.

So my mom's in this hospital, she's there for months. She's very slowly starting to get better, starting to move like a finger, that kind of thing. And the entire time my mom's in the hospital, my dad's acting really weird. He is talking a lot about the strain on him and how much he's taking care of my mom, but he's making a big deal about it. Whenever we go to the hospital or I call and talk to my mom, she's talking him up too, like he's this amazing person.

While my mom's in the hospital, I have my first daughter. And like two weeks later, my dad comes over to see her for the first time. He comes over to our house and I just remember handing him my daughter and immediately regretting it, feeling terrified. He held my daughter for two hours. Me and my wife sat there on the other side of the couch talking to him and we would not leave him. I remember feeling like my dad was holding my daughter hostage.

He holds it the entire time talking to us. Doesn't look at her once, doesn't kiss her once, doesn't do anything. At the end, okay, I better go. Hands us our daughter back and leaves. As soon as he left the door, I talked to my wife and said, I don't know why, but my dad can never touch my daughter ever again. And that was the only time he ever touched her. My mom, she was in the hospital for a long time. And then they let her go home with my dad's care. They had a nurse come once or twice a week and she would come for like an hour.

And other than that, my dad was going to work for eight hours a day, five days a week and leaving my mom home all day paralyzed. My dad was setting it up that he's this amazing person. He's doing all this work with my mom and going to work. And he's so burnt out and he doesn't have money for care. So we offer him money and he says, no, I don't I don't want to take it. OK, we give money to my mom without my dad. No, we give it to her.

And like a week later, my dad bought a new car with her money. So now memories and feelings are starting to pile up and I'm starting to process lots of stuff. So this is where I really start to realize what's happening, what went on in my childhood. And I'm really starting to put all these things together. And my wife is helping me. My therapist is helping me. I'm talking to my brothers more. My wife and I talk and we decide we're going to disown my dad.

We decided there's no reason to have him around. We don't like him. We don't want him around our family. We don't want him holding our daughter anymore. There's no reason to have him in our lives.

So one day I finally decide, OK, I need to give my mom a heads up. I know she's always been on my dad's side, but, you know, I know she still loves us. And so she deserves a heads up that I'm going to disown my dad, because even though by this time she's getting better and she can somewhat move a little bit, she relies on him physically. But also, I know even if she wasn't paralyzed, my dad would never let her see us if we disowned him.

So I call her up and I say, "Hey mom, I just want to let you know my wife and I are planning on disowning dad. I know that you like to take his side. And so I wanted to give you a heads up because this will probably be the last time that you see us since he won't let you see us after we disown him." There was silence. And then my mom on the other side panicked, says, "Get me out of here." This is the first my mom has ever led on that she's not happy.

It's just like, I can't be with him. I think he's going to kill me. I don't feel safe here. Don't leave me. So I talked to my brothers, let them know what mom said. It might've gone on for like two months that we're talking and trying to figure out what we want to do. My mom is getting more and more convinced that she needs to go to the point that she says she suspects my dad has figured out her plan and she's afraid he's going to kill her.

Finally, we decided we need to get my mom out of the house. My brothers and I are ready to get her out. We are absolutely terrified. And so we actually made a plan. My dad was going to go to work. My mom, who could barely walk with a cane at that point without him knowing, she packed up like a couple of days before we did this. We were going to have her put a cardboard box on the ring camera because we didn't want him to see us walking up to the house.

The night before, I'm talking to my older brother and he's terrified. Doesn't know if he can go through with getting our mom out of the house because he's so scared of my dad. The next morning, we're down the block. We were on the phone with her. We say, go. She walks out on the front porch, puts a cardboard box on the ring. She can barely stand and move.

We drive over as fast as we can, park the car, run around the back of the house where she's already unlocked the door, run through the house. We grab her bags. We're taking everything that we possibly can. It was probably two minutes. The scariest part was as we're driving away, we're maybe 20 minutes down the road and we all start getting calls from our dad. And none of us answered them.

We go to this woman's shelter. They are amazing. I didn't even know there were services like this. They helped us send a message to our dad to disown him right there and then on the spot. They gave us guidance on what we need to do legally. They gave my mom emotional support. They told us, you need to be careful. When the partner leaves is the most dangerous time. My older brother lives in the mountains. And so we decided that was the safest place for us all to go.

I took my wife, my daughter, my brothers, their wives. We all went up to the mountains with my mom and we ended up staying there for like two or three nights, afraid that our dad was going to come kill us all. I definitely second-guessed myself. I would go back and forth between I did the right thing, I feel very good about myself, and then all of a sudden like the next thought would be like, what if he's sitting there crying and sad? What if he didn't deserve this?

I can't go back from this. Sitting around my family, who's all just super sad and scared, and we have handguns nearby in case my dad actually does come attack us. We're actually like in siege mode, waiting for my dad to come murder us all. And all I can feel is disgust that I betrayed him.

Running away from my dad in high school, I was traumatized. Through the rest of my life, I couldn't remember that moment without almost having a panic attack. I felt so guilty over what I had done. Multiply that by a million for having not only disowned him, but taken his wife from him. I didn't really want to exist.

I just kept going back to my mom wanted it. And that's what really helps me like not blame myself. So a couple of days later, we decided to go home and my dad sent us an email. He sent it to us all, including our wives. And it's this like 10 page long email. And it was just so evil and angry and

At some point during writing this email, the formatting changes, it starts getting more erratic. And basically, it was just a rant telling us all how much he hated us and specifically saying me and my mom killed him. And the very last sentence is, the party is starting. My dad was so crazy, it couldn't have meant anything. But my mom knew that was their code for killing themselves.

Because I had started this thing, I felt like I was the one that needed to talk to the police. If we were going to find something bad, then it was my responsibility to do that. So I called the police asking them to do a welfare check on my dad. And they refused. They said it was too unsafe. And so we waited like another day or two, called them back. They sent someone out. And that's when we found out that my dad had killed himself five days after we got our mom.

And the first thought I had was, oh my God, are they going to think that I killed him? And then the shock kind of hit me. I could barely tell my family. I just started breaking down. Two days later, my younger brother and I decided that we needed to go visit the house before my mom went back. You know, clean it up.

We were very concerned about her. My mom was always helpless. That's how we saw her. And so we wanted to go clean up her house and prepare it for her so that it wouldn't hurt her as much.

So we're walking this house and it's a mess. My dad just messed it up, threw stuff everywhere, knocked stuff off tables. There was pills everywhere. And, you know, we just saw this blender full of wine and pills sitting there. And seeing the vessel, seeing how he did it, that was traumatizing. We walk around the house. OK, it's kind of messed up. We clean it up. We're going to leave.

And so as we go to walk back out the front door, I noticed on the coffee table in the living room, there was a suitcase and we hadn't looked in it yet. I open up the suitcase. I'm trying to process what's in front of me. The suitcase has three handguns, ammo for the handguns. He had his passport and that was it. There was no clothes. There was nothing long-term. That's when it dawned on me

What we were hiding out from, what we were afraid of, this is actually what his plan was. So I yelled at my brother and before I said anything, I just said, hey, look at this. What do you think is going on here? And he just looked at it and looked up at me and just said, holy shit. It appears that instead of chasing down his family and murdering us all as we were hiding out in the mountains, he decided to kill himself.

To this day, I believe that was the nicest thing my dad has ever done for me and my family.

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When I realized that my dad did intend to murder us, that was also incredibly relieving. Like my worlds came together into one again. It was like, yes, this is the truth. He really was homicidal. All those times I believed that he could have killed me, it was true. Us hiding out in the mountains, we weren't crazy. We really knew what he was capable of. I needed that. When I searched that house, that was what I needed.

We had a memorial a month or two after his death. I knew that I wanted to say something because I needed to start taking control, speaking out against him. I just knew that I needed to do something. I had my daughter in my arms and I could barely get through just eight words without crying. But for me, that was the beginning of me making this stuff public. All the things that were private, everything that my dad did to us, hidden.

That was my goal was I needed to get it out. So I started talking to people, talked to some of his co-workers at that memorial. I kind of got the feeling something was up there. So later on, we ended up contacting them and it was very eye opening. We found out, you know, his co-workers were afraid to be in the same room as him. They were really creeped out by him. Apparently the last couple of months of his life, he was researching Romania. The IT guy told us that.

Not just researching Romania, but like researching flights to Romania. And we found out that while my mom is paralyzed, while she's sick, just based on what my dad told them, his co-workers that he had worked with for like 20 years had been calling the police for welfare checks.

And the owner of the company had been taking a good amount of time looking through all of their products to find if anything contained thallium. Because thallium is the only known poison to cause Guillain-Barre syndrome. And thallium comes from old mouse killers, which they stocked. So at that point, I decided I needed to know more. And we cut some of my mom's hair.

sent it to a poison lab and it took like a month to get the results. So they got back to me and the person on the other end said she has very high levels of thallium in her system. He said, this is definitely abnormal. She was definitely poisoned. You need to talk to the police. But we never did. We didn't go to the police. My dad was already dead by that point. We realized looking back the times that my mom was getting really sick, my dad was poisoning her

and just hadn't given her enough poison until the final time, but it still didn't kill her. And afterwards, purposefully did not take care of her and would not let us take care of her because he wanted her to die because their life insurance money was running out within the next year. And that was what he was planning on using to go to Romania. My mom still suffers from the poisoning.

And I cannot help thinking at times she deserves this for staying with him. I struggle with this feeling because I love my mom and I don't know how to reconcile that. I can't separate her from my dad yet. I'm still working on that and I think I'll get there, but I'm not there yet.

Having gone through my experience, I believe the partners of abusers are partly responsible for the abuse done to their kids. I don't want to believe that. I saw my mom suffer. Like I saw her struggle. I saw her get abused. And yet I still come back to she was the one person who could have gotten us out of there.

It doesn't mean I don't love her. It doesn't mean I think she's a bad person. I'm definitely not saying that because I think she's a wonderful person. But was she complicit in his abuse? Yes. My mom still has trouble walking. She still struggles. She deals with a lot of pain that she can't get rid of. Sometimes she has to go on a ventilator. Her health is not very good. She's going to struggle with this for the rest of her life, I think.

But my mom, who my brothers and I thought we were going to have to take care of because she was so helpless around our dad. My mom has shown us to be this amazing person, totally self-sufficient. She's definitely doing really good about taking care of herself, exercising, that kind of stuff. I have seen this side of my mom that I never saw when my dad was around. Just seeing that is healing for me.

But the biggest challenge that I'm dealing with from this has been accepting my relationship with my older brother. I had this picture of dad being out of our lives and then me and my brothers and my mom being very close together because we were always so close. And so I was really shocked when after all this happened, everyone needed space.

Me, my brothers, my mom, we all distance ourselves. I noticed that especially with my older brother, I really thought we had this very super close relationship. He was always my role model. He was the person I looked up to my entire childhood in place of my dad. He filled a very big role for me and my little brother. And my dad put the responsibility on him of being a father figure to me.

He must have felt the weight of that. And I think he needs space because he's been filling a role that's way too big for him. I hope in the future that changes. I really like having him in my life, but I'm afraid that there's something between us that we might not be able to fix. I used to think we were a very close family, but when I really thought about it after this all went down,

We weren't close like a family who loves each other and chooses to be around each other is close. We were close like prisoners are close. You live next to these people in a prison every day for so many years, and you're going to get close to them out of necessity to survive. But once you get released, is it someone you really want to hang out with? You don't know until that point.

But I think that period is mostly over for us. But for a while, we just needed to be away from each other so that we could focus on ourselves and not still feel like we're in that prison, reminding each other of that trauma. I suffer a lot of emotional ways from my childhood, but me realizing what really went on in my childhood, helping my mom escape, my dad killing himself, I realized

I have analyzed myself so many times and I just feel nothing but relief. I want to feel something else. I want to feel sadness or whatever else you're supposed to feel when someone kills himself. But every day I am so happy he's gone. That's what makes me the saddest of all is thinking how could someone die and provide so much relief?

It feels kind of like my life was corrected. Now that my dad's gone, my family is actually happy. But the one thing I learned about myself is I don't think I'm ever going to be healed. It's bittersweet. I love my life. But at the same time, I think my dad ruined it for me. I don't think it's in the cards for me. I'm as happy as I can be, but I don't think I'm ever going to be okay. And I'm coming to terms with that.

But my goal right now is really to give my kids the best life possible. I feel like if I can give them a great childhood, let them grow up into happy, good people, I can die happy. Today's episode featured Jesse. If you'd like to reach out, you can contact him at jessefromtiah at gmail.com. That's J-E-S-S-E from T-I-A-H at gmail.com.

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I'm your host, Witt Misseldein. Today's episode was co-produced by me, Andrew Waits, and Aviva Lipkowitz, with special thanks to the This Is Actually Happening team, including Ellen Westberg. The intro music features the song Illabi by Tipper.

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