254: What if your father annihilated the family?
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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. If you've ever jumped into water thinking it's deep, but in reality it's shallow, it just hits your entire body, has that reverberating awfulness. That's what it felt like. From Wondery, I'm Witt Misseldein.

You're listening to This Is Actually Happening. Episode 254. What if your father annihilated the family?

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My parents met at a diner where they both worked. My mother was a waitress, my father was a line cook in South Jersey. They were both young. My father, I think, had only been in this country for a few years at the time. My father was born in Crete, the largest island in Greece, and grew up in a pretty small village. We're talking unpaved roads, a couple of cafes,

He grew up with two sisters, an absent father. His mother, Maiaia, basically sacrificed everything, including often food, for her children. And she worked the fields and did her best to raise them.

The older sisters made their way to Athens to work for the airline. And at some point my father was sent to live with his uncle on a farm and from what I gather, the uncle was quite abusive to him. At 18 years old, my father made his way from Greece to the States. Every male in Greece is bound by conscription. They have to do so much time in the military.

He joined the merchant marines and did not complete his time with them. He jumped ship and instead came to America for opportunity.

It's strange to grow up with someone and kind of know nothing about them. My father was someone who loved to invent mythologies. I mean, I am Greek, we love mythology, but he did not speak concretely about where he was from, ever. I only knew these kinds of stereotypical abstractions.

My mother grew up the oldest of three children. She grew up in a household that was also pockmarked by abuse. When her father returned from the war, I think he was never the same. And as a result, I'm sure, was looking for a way out as well. Aren't we all? She says that when I was as young as three or four, I started asking her if we could move.

And so her running joke was always, "You always wanted out of New Jersey. You never liked New Jersey." And I know what that means. It's not about New Jersey. It was about my father. I never meant, "Can we move with him?" I meant, "Can we run?"

While I definitely have some good memories of my father, when someone casts that large of a shadow, it just sucks all the light out of the room. I remember my childhood as a space that was unpredictable, which might be the scariest thing to a child.

There was a day, my brother and I, very young, my brother is younger than me by two and a half years, we had a rickety, rusted swing set out back that was barely cemented into place, so it was extra fun. And he was attempting to use all of the swings at once, but he wouldn't share. And I'd been taught sharing is caring. And I ran in to tell on him. And I went to my father and was like, "He, you know, he won't give me a turn."

and my father backhanded me. That's unpredictability. When you are being told one message and then punished for expecting that message to be upheld. Likewise, and certainly later on, there are moments when I really fuck up in some major way, and it's not only not punished but rewarded.

So I was living in a space where good behavior could be either ignored, rewarded, or punished. Bad behavior could be rewarded, ignored, or punished. And it's utterly impossible to predict what's coming next. And that makes every moment feel as though it's dangerous.

And so I was always shifting, pivoting in nanoseconds, reading, you know, computing body language, tone, the sounds of footsteps, the weight of footsteps, the ways doors were closed. I was constantly surveying my landscape so that I could adjust to be whatever it was that I thought would keep my father calm.

Almost any time that we pick up a book or listen to something about trauma, somebody will mention those proverbial eggshells, right? It felt like we were walking on eggshells.

Eggshells would have been more comfortable, frankly. At least you're like, "Okay, that's going to crunch beneath my feet. There's some measure of expectation." Instead, the kind of hypervigilance that was turned on for me, it would take 40 years to turn it off, and it's never fully off. But for a very long time, I lived every moment of my life as though I were being watched by cameras. Nothing felt safe.

In order to try to keep some semblance of calm, basically I think I have a doctorate in people-pleasing. I'm just predicting what it is that I think someone wants from me, what my father wants from me. I think my childhood was one in which I learned to be unbelievably observant, but also to disappear. My parents certainly fought, but for the most part, I think my mother also tried to pacify him.

I mean, she grew up with a father who raged. And so rage as a way to show love was a baseline for normal for her as well. I have one younger brother, and it is fairly well known across a number of Greek communities that Greek boys get a pass that Greek girls don't. And because of that, and I think because of his general easygoingness, my brother was a little bit of a golden child. He was definitely liked more.

Because I was the oldest child, I also provoked my father a lot to keep any attention that might have gotten pointed anywhere else toward my brother or mother on me.

So on the one hand, you've got me who is people-pleasing, micro-shifting, and attempting to keep this peace. And on the other hand, you've got the part of me who will indeed provoke my father to point all of the negative attention to me. I can take it. That way, my brother or my mother wouldn't suffer the brunt of it. And there is an incredible amount of tension between those two. They are incompatible survival skills in some way.

I had to believe that I had some control, and so I did anything and everything I could to test it. I believed it was a code I could crack somehow. The difficult part of that is sometimes that works. Does it work? No, of course not, but sometimes it feels like it does. But all of the data is inconclusive because I'm dealing with a volatile element. But I still had to believe that I had some control.

When I was five years old, my father's family came to visit from Greece. My Yaya, my Greek grandmother, she stayed for five years. At some point though, both of his sisters visited, and it was the only time I'd met them. So I went to Greek school for six years.

Like so many people who are first gen, you've got one foot in the old world and one foot in the new, right? You're trying to keep up old customs, but also assimilate. And the tension that arose from trying to do both of those things at the same time was really tricky to navigate.

I'm not sure that I ever really make sense of my identity fully. What I knew when I was young, yeah, we were a little bit poor. Yes, I grew up bilingual speaking this second language. But the thing that I knew I was was smart. I was always smart in school. And so that was where I could easily focus my identity. I didn't grow up with books in my house, but I was voracious for books.

Part of that was I needed access to other worlds that were not the reality that I was living in.

While I was able to hold on to the ways that my father cut me down with his words, with his language, the ways that he physically hurt me with a backhand or a punch, my brain rightfully kept pulling the curtain over the parts of my childhood where my father visited my bedroom at night.

I was sexually abused as a child often, and I think that this is true for so many folks who grew up with their abuser living with them. God, always around the holidays, any holidays,

And anytime we had to go do something as a family, where we would have to kind of put on this good public showing, it feels like there was always a purging of that gross, uncontrollable impulse for him. And so, you know, we'd show up at a family reunion, and he'd be all smiles and laughs, and I would be a hollow, broken child who hadn't slept and had been molested the night before.

Of course, I knew that that was happening, but it's amazing what one can shove from one's mind in order to survive. And I had to keep that on a barge floating way adrift in my mind in order to keep going. So I have a host of medical ailments that pop up. I'm run rampant with hives, head to toe.

i undergo every single allergy test known to man i can tell everyone what i'm allergic to it is my father but it's just nobody knows why i'm covered in hives

I have ice pick migraines from the time that I am five, maybe? I used to wedge my head in between the doorframe and the door and pull the door closed on my head because that pressure was the only thing that felt like it would relieve the pressure in my head. I have chronic vaginal infections that the doctors conclude I must be allergic to bubble bath. Nobody is putting any of this together.

I think that for those of us who have biological others who are at least somewhat present in our lives, it is natural to want love from them. And so no matter how much my father hurt me, hurt all of us, deep down I just still wanted him to love me. And he was not a man without remorse.

Or he wasn't a man who couldn't fake remorse. I still don't know if his remorse was ever real, but occasionally he would come into my bedroom at night and instead of things going the way that I thought they would, he would collapse in this ball of weeping self-pity and beg me for forgiveness. And I forgave him every time.

partially because I knew forgiving him is what was most likely to get him out of my room, but also because I wanted to believe him. I wanted to believe that he was in control of his own emotions, that he was able to stop his behavior, to change his behavior. To see my father cry also made me cry. And I was there for the very acts that procured all of this weeping and shame, and so I somehow felt complicit in it.

Of course, I know now that I wasn't, but as a child, it was just, here's this very strong, macho, toxically masculine man weeping at the end of my bed and begging forgiveness. I had to give it to him, especially if I wanted him to love me, which is all I ever wanted.

I was 13 and I came home from school and I could see as I was walking down the street that my father was home. And when I came in, he was sitting at the kitchen table holding a rifle, which he then pointed at me and said, I want to ask you a question.

He was clearly drunk. You know, "drunk" was a language I spoke fluently by then, for sure. And so he asked me where my mother was, and the question to me was so strange. It hadn't really occurred to me that she could be anywhere other than work at the grocery store. He told me that we were going to wait for her to come home, and he was going to kill her, then me, then himself.

And I just stood there, waiting, really, to be killed. I remember thinking, "This is it. This is it. This is it. This is it. It's happening." And then he started to cry. The gun wavered a bit. The barrel of it was sort of swaying. He accused me of being in on things with her. I don't even know what that meant. And then eventually he got up and went and passed out in his bedroom.

I don't know how much time passed, but I went outside. I went into our backyard and just wept. And the last thing he said to me before he passed out was, if you tell anyone, I'll kill you. And I just thought, okay, I need to pull together before my mother comes home. Because if I tell her, he'll kill us both. Abusers, they take a lot from us.

But if you hit me, my bruises, they fade. If you sexually abuse me, you also go away and I recover in some ways. But my father was a masterful psychological abuser. And what he'd done is strip me of any semblance of self-esteem over the years.

And "meshed" is the psychological term. I was not a man who knew boundaries, who knew where he ended and I began. I certainly didn't know where I ended and he began. He'd had ultimate power over my life all along. For me, it was the moment where he just... he turned the volume up to a volume we hadn't quite yet been at. It froze me.

I don't remember breathing. I can't tell you how long that episode lasted. What I do know is that when he walked away, I still believed that he was in control, that this was a scare tactic. Once he got up from the table, it sort of undid the initial fear that I'd walked into that room with, which was, I'm going to die.

I believed he knew how to walk right up to the line. Hell, cross the line. But that he knew how to not cross it in a way that was permanent. It was a lie that I told myself that I believed because I needed to believe it. That was the breaking point for me. I realized that no matter how good my grades were, my behavior wasn't saving me.

And I needed to toughen up. That's what I thought. I need to toughen up if I'm going to survive this. I shaved half my head, dyed the rest black, got all the black clothing, all the black makeup. I mean, I was just insta-goth overnight. Kind of a punk goth. Shortly after that, I just started doing drugs and fucking anyone kind enough to sit still for me.

grades out the window. Who gives a shit? I mean, when people say zero fucks, I just always think you should meet 15-year-old Lisa. 15-year-old Lisa, zero fucks. Numbing out the pain of my life in any way that I can

You know, of course it's not just the drugs, it's not just the promiscuity. I'm also numbing and taking control with an incredibly restrictive diet. I've struggled with eating disorders my entire life. I'm also cutting as just a way to release some of the pressure that is built up in this ecosystem that is my body.

I had been suicidal since adolescence. I think when I was, I don't know, 9, 10, 11, I grabbed an entire bottle of Advil, took the whole bottle, woke up 12, 16 hours later and was like, ugh, still here. I think that the time that I spent contemplating death, contemplating suicide, was a way for me to exercise control.

Like, okay, if we decide that we really can't do this anymore, there is a way out. So it's about this time when I am 15. My parents are obviously edging toward a divorce. They are fighting and they are fighting openly.

My mother found out that my father had a gun, and she had called the police, and at the word "gun," they were quite interested. They basically helped her walk through a plan of how to get them there without tipping him off, and she was explaining the plan to a friend on the phone. The plan was that when my father came home, she would call the friend and say, "Let's go to the movies."

And my father came home as she was explaining the plan. And I think she just started repeating, let's go to the movies, let's go to the movies. And the police were there quickly, as far as she tells me.

And so he was removed by police force, that I was there for, kicking and screaming, you know, old world bullshit of like, "This is my house, nobody tells me what to do in my house, this is America, bleh," kind of normal stuff that he loved to say. And he was carted off by police.

A neighbor changed the locks for us, and I remember thinking, "We're gonna die. Like, you just kicked this man out by police force? If you don't think he's coming back in the middle of the night to kill us all, you're crazy." And there were a number of times where I thought I heard his keys jangling at the front door, and I don't know if he was there or not because I was too scared to look.

I had no idea what to do with the abundance of energy. I'd become a laser beam of energy that for so long had just been scanning for my father, scanning for my father, and I think I thought for a long time that like once he was gone things would be good.

So I have this abundance of energy that had once been given to my father and taken by him, and in his absence, I didn't know where to put it. And so every ounce of it turned inward. And that is really the birth of an incredibly difficult and painful panic disorder. And so I begin having multiple panic attacks a day.

Your body goes right into fight or flight mode, increased heart rate, sweaty, shaky, fight or flight super kicks in, cortisol is rushing through your body, adrenaline rushes through your body. And it would do that three, four times a day. I was at once scared of open spaces, closed spaces, people, the absence of people. Like, there was no rhyme or reason. I couldn't figure out my triggers. It was just like, everything makes me panic.

Nothing, just nothing seemed safe. And I had no idea what it was, because I had no psychological literacy. I didn't even know I'd been traumatized. That wasn't a word that I possessed. I didn't understand any of it. And as a result, I thought I was broken.

After my father is gone, he takes his money from the divorce settlement and buys a small bungalow, maybe 15, 20 minutes away from the house where we were living. And it's worth mentioning my younger brother still had a relationship with him. It was inconsistent. My father might promise to pick him up for something and never show up. But no one ever seemed to understand the danger of him.

The message that I was getting and have been getting my whole life was that that danger wasn't real. I guess for me, the danger faded away as well when he didn't return. I mean, maybe I just couldn't hold on to the danger and still function in my life.

After enough time, especially after he started dating someone new, very soon after the divorce, my brother told us that my father had become a born-again Christian and was engaged. And I was like, great, that'll take some of the pressure off. I mean, that'll never work, and that's a con that he's running, surely, but at least it'll keep his focus off of us for a while. So I think for a time, I was able to forget about any imminent danger.

Because my body was the danger now. My brain was the danger now. It was betraying me daily. The only thing that calmed my anxiety was alcohol. Drinking to me seemed like the most magical elixir. It absolutely quieted my anxiety and it worked so effectively.

So coming out of high school, I just found myself kicking around the campus of a local community college. And I dropped out after three semesters because I just, I didn't want to be there. I was so lost. And I didn't know what to do with my life other than try to survive it. I wound up following my parents' footsteps into the restaurant business. I attended bar.

And I met a man who I will call Matt, and he was the first man I really, really loved, who really loved me back. That, of course, turned out to be a bit of an abusive relationship. And I stayed in it for almost eight years, I think.

During that time, I think I met up with my father three times. Once, I picked up a six-pack and stopped by my father's house. It was just the two of us. And we were watching Jeopardy. He said to me, "I'm sorry for everything." And I said, "Me too." Because I didn't know how not to apologize for things that weren't my fault. The next time I saw him would be the last time I saw him in person.

early 20s for me. And he was living with a woman and her two children in his house. And my brother and I went over for Christmas. There was an older daughter who at the time was probably 11. She had a younger brother about the same age distance between myself and my younger brother. And there was real holiday tension in that house. And the girl was lying on the floor drawing pictures. And then we laid on the carpet drawing together.

I saw in that little girl a younger version of me. I wasn't conscious of any of that, but I knew I felt guilty and I wasn't sure why. And I wasn't sure if it was because I'd escaped him and she was stuck in it. I don't know. It was really difficult to look at this surrogate little me.

was just like being in this, like a funhouse mirror of my own childhood reflected back, and it was utterly destabilizing. It was so warped, and I felt so dizzy in that space that I kept looking at the ceiling because it was constant. So the last time that I spoke to my father was New Year's Eve, the Y2K New Year's Eve.

We were having a New Year's Eve party at the house that I grew up in, and my father called. Everyone was out front, so I picked up the phone inside and just said, Hi, Dad. And he said, Where's my daughter? And I was like, This is me. And he was like, You're not my daughter. Very drunk, right? Full slurring. You're not my daughter. Go get my daughter. I need to talk to her.

I was like, "Dad, it's me. It's Lisa. This is me." He yelled, like, you know, "You're not my daughter!" And I just hung up on him. And he called back. "Hi, Dad." "You need to go get my daughter." "Dad, like, it is me."

10 years old again, just pleading with this man. It becomes so important to me in that moment that he recognizes me, that he sees me, that he hears me, that he understands that I actually am his daughter and that means something. But I was so utterly wounded that I spoke the last two words I ever spoke to him, and they were, fuck you, and I hung up.

and when he called back, I just let it ring. I don't regret them as final words. But in real time, I walked to the fridge and got a beer, joined the party. Midnight struck and everybody lost their minds, and I was sitting on the front steps, quietly crying, plastering on the fake smile for people who were around me, and I felt utterly alone.

But eventually, I drank that feeling away too. 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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This Is Actually Happening is sponsored by ADT. ADT knows a lot can happen in a second. One second, you're happily single. And the next second, you catch a glimpse of someone and you don't want to be. Maybe one second, you have a business idea that seems like a pipe dream. And the next, you have an LLC and a dream come true. And when it comes to your home, one second, you feel safe,

And the next, something goes wrong. But with ADT's 24-7 professional monitoring, you still feel safe. Because when every second counts, count on ADT. Visit ADT.com today. So a few years passed. You know, I'm still drinking. I'm dating. I'm doing those sorts of things. I'm making good money, attending bar. And I've really started...

doing some work on the self to extend empathy, to learn empathy, to extend kindness. Because to be vulnerable in the house that I grew up in was to be in danger. I could never be vulnerable. And so I was learning how to be vulnerable, how to let some people close, how to be a better person. And then on my 27th birthday, things changed radically.

For my 27th birthday, I went out with all of my friends. We drank lord knows how much whiskey. And so the next day, I'd woken up with a raucous hangover that seemed determined to skin me alive. My sweet, very old Nokia cell phone rang. It was my brother. And my brother said, I think Dad's been murdered.

"Have you ever jumped into water thinking it's deep, but in reality it's shallow? It just hits your entire body, has that reverberating awfulness?" That's what it felt like. And I said, "Well, what do you mean murdered?" And he said, "I just went by the house. Police are everywhere. They've just brought me down to the station. We don't know what's happening, but somebody's definitely dead.

So I immediately turned on the news. You know, there was my father's house on the news. My knees gave out. I fell to the rug. And a howl left from somewhere so deep in my body, I'm not sure I've ever had access to that space again.

I think it was the sound of what happens when so many emotions come out in a single sound, right? It was a howl of grief and rage and confusion and fear. It felt like the me who'd been existing up until that point, who had really just been trying to hold it together and hobble through life. Yes, you're broken, but you can hobble through it. That belief came undone in that instant.

I thought I was broken before. I was done for now. What we knew at that point was that there were three dead bodies, four people lived in that house, and one of the dead bodies was male. That was all of the information that we had.

So my brother got to my house, we cracked open a beer and basically started running scenarios. Because if my father were the gunman, had killed that whole family, and he were at large, I mean, we were both certain that I would probably be at the top of the list of who was next.

We waited for the news, and when the news came on, the SWAT team was pulling body bags on gurneys from it. They pulled three, they did some interviews with neighbors. He was such a nice man, those sorts of neighbors. You never can tell about people. We went to the bar. A couple of friends joined us. My then-partner joined us.

When the 11 o'clock news came on, we kind of leaned against the pool table, you know, turned up the volume, and that was the first time that our name, our last name, was printed on the screen. And we knew then that my father was dead. Two females had been killed by gunshot in what was an apparent double murder-suicide, my father being the one who committed suicide.

That bit of information, I think, is the closest thing I've ever experienced to time travel because in that moment, I was 12 or 13 years old again being held at gunpoint by my father. It took me directly to that moment, to that moment when I believed he knew how not to cross that final line, when I still believed he had been in control of his emotions.

All of that. It was undone. That mythology that I had built to help myself survive was undone. It was as though every wound that I'd ever had that had built kind of a healthy scab over it over the years just tore open at once. Because I knew that the thing I had felt most acutely in my childhood, I was in actual danger. I knew how true it had been.

It undid the central narrative of my life, one of the most primary narratives of my life. The moment I knew for certain that my father had pointed and fired a gun at a 15-year-old girl, it felt as though he'd killed a part of me, too.

Empathy is not a strong enough word for what I felt for that little girl. I was that little girl. And what dumb stretches of luck prevented me from being shot by him? The guilt I felt about all of that was just tearing me in two. Because if I had really known that, couldn't I have done something to stop him?

Could I have? Without myself getting killed? I don't know. I don't think so. But that question was there. That guilt is what I think would take me down an even darker path for some time. I wake up the next morning, face down, in my living room with a slanted half a beer in my hand. So I go upstairs to get showered, get dressed for work.

I went to my mother's house after I left my house. I went to my mom's house before I had to go to work. And my mother said, we need to talk about the funeral. I think I gave a 10 minute rant about a funeral being a celebration of life. And what the fuck were we celebrating? How dare we celebrate this man? I mean, I was full of vitriol.

And I'm sitting in the house where, you know, where we had all been abused, and none of us were talking about that. Ugh, I hated the me who was showing up in that moment. I was the person that people were walking on eggshells around, that my own family was walking on eggshells around. I was my father in that way, and I hated myself for it. So I left. I went to a bar.

The way that I deal with everything that's happening is by going into sort of CSI detective mode. I get hell-bent on figuring out what happened in that house. I need a narrative. I need to make sense of it in some way. I also, very quickly, become executrix of a crime scene. I become executrix of the estate.

We are tasked of going into the house and finding any paperwork of importance. Is there a suicide note that the police didn't find? Is there a will? My brother and I went into that house. The bodies had decomposed for a number of days before they were found.

Decomp had permeated every inch of that house. I can still snip out Decomp like a trained dog. It was a fucking crime scene. There were squares of wall that had been sawed out. There were giant squares of carpet that had been removed. The bathtub was full of the big black blowflies of death. They left the mattresses, which were soaked through with blood. There was, you know, blood spatter on the ceilings.

And so I walked through the kitchen to get to the basement door and peered into a pot that was on the stovetop and there were three ears of corn bobbing in water. We were in utter shock. But I go sit down in the basement

My father was a bit of a hoarder, so I find lots of things that I don't want to find, like porn, and sex toys, and a thousand trash bags, and receipts of donations to the church, an essay that I had written in Greek school that I could no longer translate. And then I found an envelope with my name on it, opened it, and it was full of photographs of me.

happy and smiling and just was evidence of a childhood that I didn't and don't remember. That wasn't the evidence I'd gone down there to collect. I was holding this evidence that some part of him really loved me.

It just, ugh. I cried. And then I heard this creepy sound from behind me. And I spun in that desk chair so quickly, scanning the dark environment. I got down on my hands and knees and saw two eyes peering out at me from under a hot water heater. And it was my father's cat.

This cat who probably borne witness to all of the violence. The cat's name was Joshua. I eventually get Joshua out from under there and I'm just like cradling it. Even in that moment, I know I am talking to myself, not actually the cat. Hyperventilating, crying, holding this cat, whispering it's going to be okay. The estate was mine to deal with.

And there was another family on the other side of this. They wanted and needed access to the house to gather the belongings of the deceased. It was a grandmother, an uncle, and the son. The grandmother touched me on the shoulder with tears in her eyes and said, "I'm so sorry for you kids." And the three of them walked in the house. My brother walked in behind them, and I leaned over the railing and vomited.

All of us sat in the living room. We were just watching the son walk around surveying where his sister was murdered, where his mother was murdered. It was so crushing I had to close my eyes. And then the grandmother started with a sentence I basically wanted to hear my entire life and couldn't hear in that moment, which was, we always knew something wasn't right with him.

My attorney helped hire somebody who would basically just empty the house for me so that I could put it on the market.

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While the estate is being settled, I apply to a number of MFA programs for writing. And so I enroll in the master's program in English at Rutgers University. After I graduate at Rutgers, I'm still attending bar. Things are going pretty well, but I'm still haunted.

I can't sleep. I'm still restricting food. My anxiety is still off the charts. Yes, I'm taking care of myself by going to therapy and dating someone who I think is good for me, but I also know I still need to make changes. And I wind up going to Tallahassee to get my PhD.

In Tallahassee, I think I get to build a whole new life where nobody knows anything about me or my father. And then in my first workshop, I immediately write about my father because what else am I going to write about? Like, that is my story. I am gearing up to get ready to take my exams. And I decide to make an appointment with a trauma specialist therapist so that I can get some tips on managing stress. She listens.

No judgment on her face. And I finally finish up and she says, okay, okay. Well, I have one question for you. What are you running from? And I was like, oh shit. I don't want to do real trauma work. I just want some tips for managing stress. And she was like, that's not how it works.

And I was like, right. So I started doing some really intensive trauma therapy. And it was really exhausting, but also useful work because it was some work that I had never dealt with before. While I'm doing that, I'm in my apartment one night in Tallahassee, Florida. And I may very well have said it out loud. The line was, I should go to Greece and find my father's family.

And the notion was so absurd that I likely looked around and was like, "Who said that?" Part of distancing myself from him for those many years was distancing myself from all things Greek. I wanted no parts of Greece or Greek identity. I wanted none of it. And yet, I am Greek. And here I was having this really strange thought.

So I kind of poked around on the internet, found some flights, and crying. I couldn't click the button because my anxiety was so intense. But I remember working out this line of thought, which was, I either get to let my anxiety, which is fear, dictate my life, or I get to say fuck it and face my fear. I did a shot of Jameson, clicked purchase now,

And there I was with a ticket for Greece. Did I know where my father's family was? Absolutely not. I knew nothing. But I also knew that I would find them. My plan was get to Athens, couch surf, island hop my way down to Crete, and then find them. I mean, it was so poorly articulated, but I just kept saying, I'll find them.

So that first day, I climbed to the Acropolis, and it was the hottest day that Athens had had that year. But standing in front of the Parthenon, my knee gave out before the Parthenon. And I realize how absurdly dramatic that sounds, but I mean, I just, I cried. It felt like home. It felt like home in a way that I, nothing ever really had.

The kindness that strangers extended to me rekindled a kind of faith in humanity that I think I'd lost for a while. My anxiety seemed to be melting away a bit. Something in me that had been a fist for so long relaxed into a palm. Everywhere that I went, my father was there too, because people looked like him. People sounded like him.

When I disembarked from the ferry the moment my foot touched Cretan soil, every hair on my body stood up. Crete was, I mean, it was in my bones. And so the next day, I'm going to go get on a bus and go to the village that I think maybe my father is from. And I get to the village.

And the first cafe that I saw, the name of it ended in "Akis" the way my last name ends in "A-K-I-S" "Akis" and I was like, "Okay, this is the right place."

And so I walk. I pick a path. There are only two. I pick the one to the right. I walk and walk and walk. And I'm looking around me, and there is this house that looks sort of split by time, all of it covered in this beautiful fuchsia bougainvillea. I've hit clearly what is, you know, nothing but a suburban sort of space. Like, I'm not going to find another cafe this way. I'm not going to find any people this way. So I turn around and walk back.

And I go into the Cretan Museum of Ethnography. I finally work up the courage to ask the woman who works there. She asks me what my last name is. I say Nicolet Dacus. And she laughs and says, well, you've come to the right place. Everyone here is Nicolet Dacus. She thinks for a while and pulls out a little plastic box, flips through it, and hands me a business card for the Taverna Nicolet Dacus.

i'm walking for a very long time to what seems like just the middle of fields and then suddenly there's this very modern taverna and a woman out front who looks utterly surprised to see any human being

I tell her what I'm doing. She finally says, "I don't know how to help. Let me get my husband." And this man rounds the corner. He asks me all of the same questions. And so we sit there for a while and it feels like a dead end. And then he says, "I know. I will get my mother." Fifteen minutes later, he returns with a woman who is 85 if she's a day. She's dressed entirely in black, which is the custom for damn near every yaya in grief.

All of these names are just too common for them to know. And I was like, you know what, let me try my mother. So I call my mother. Do you remember what, you know, my grandfather's name was? And she picks one and says, I think it was this. I go back to them. And the old woman looks at me, kind of takes a short breath in, and says, was your father killed?

And I don't really know how to answer that, but I just say yes. And she leans forward and grabs my forearms and says, "Bedimo," which means "my child." And I just start crying. And then she gets up and leaves. And the woman I met when I first came in, I look to her, and she is grinning so wide, and she says, "You are not alone anymore."

When the old woman returns, she hands me a small photo, and it's a black and white photo of my father at 18 years old. A picture of him I've never seen, and certainly not the way that I remember him. And she makes a phone call. "Okay, they come now." And I was like, "What do you... what do you mean?" And she was like, "Your aunt. She comes."

Fifteen minutes later, I watch three figures, silhouettes, approach over the horizon. And she was the aunt that I'd met when I was, I don't know, five, when she came to visit? And we just sort of cried. We walk back. She's showing me off to every single person.

We stop at the friend's house, and she has the same photo of my father, only bigger. It's an 8x10 on the table. Wow, that's so strange, right? They have the same photo. Then we leave. We walk back to my aunt's house. Everyone keeps saying that it's a miracle. Inathasma, right? It's a miracle. It's a miracle. We get to my aunt's house, and I just stop walking when she opens the door. She kind of asks, what's wrong?

It's the house that I walked to when I got off the bus and I walked past those men, the place that looked split by time with the bougainvillea. I got off of the bus and walked directly to her house. I walked to the house my father grew up in. What kind of compass is that?

Finally, some more family starts showing up. And as the sun begins to set and it starts to cool off, the party really starts. And that night, that evening, with family and dancing and music and more food, it remains one of the most purely joyous moments of my life.

The next day, I go next door to my aunt's dwelling to have breakfast and get ready to leave because I'm so utterly overwhelmed. I can't stay. I say to her, can I ask you a question? Is this the house my father grew up in? She says yes. And she says, can I ask you a question? How did he die? And over her shoulder is the enormous picture of my father, that same black and white photo that everybody has.

Throughout the night, the people who met me kept telling me the same thing. Your father was a great man. He was such a good man. He was a great man. He was mythologized. He was the man who made it out of the village, made it all the way to America, who started his own business and had a family. That was what he sold them on. That was the story. And maybe he had been a good man when they'd known him. But when my aunt asked me how they died and I paused...

She smashed her right fist into her left palm and said, car accident, as a question. Oh, God, I ran that math so fast. I hadn't traveled 3,000 miles to bring a 70-something-year-old woman the same grief that I had been reckoning with for almost six years at that point. They believed something good. I didn't want to take it from them. And I said, yes, I agreed. I lied. And I lied about something big.

And I'm not somebody who likes to lie and keep secrets. My whole life had been keeping family secrets, and here I was adding to it. That was not my aim. But she was so relieved. She crossed herself three times. You know, I left, got on the bus that day, weepy, and made my way back to Athens shortly thereafter. And I got to Athens. My cousin George picks me up. We're driving along. And he asked me, did you like your father?

I kinda sized him up, and I thought, "Alright, I'll take a chance." I said, "No, he was an asshole." And George said, "Yeah, mine too." And I was like, "Bro, we're gonna be friends forever." Like, I just, we like, we just, we loved each other immediately. And then George and I go out for drinks. Over drinks. George says to me, "You know, I'm surprised by what you told my mother. What you said, it's not what we heard."

And I said, well, what did you hear? And he said, well, what we heard is terrible. And right then I knew that he knew the truth. And I said, yeah, that's the truth. And he said, why did he do this? Which so often is the first question people ask. Why did he do it?

And I said, you know, I spent years trying to answer that question. I read every single page of police and toxicology reports. I've looked at the positioning of bullets. I have played it out in my head. I have played it out by physically getting on my own bed and putting myself in that position. I have tried again and again to figure out what happened that night. And the truth of it is none of us will know because none of us was there.

But then he said something that I badly needed to hear in that moment, which was what you said to my mother was a gift. Really? Because I feel awful. Who the hell am I to decide which truths people have access to? He came down hard on the side of it being a gift. And I don't know if he's right. I'm still ambivalent to the core about it. I think everybody has a right to the truth, fundamentally. But in the moment, it felt like the right thing to do.

I let her lean into the fantasy. I let her lead me into that fantasy. Because how much better would things have been if that's all it had been? A car accident. I'm asked often why I chose to go to Greece. And of course, I was looking for answers of some sort.

Here is a man who did this horrible thing. How? What breeds that? What manifests that? And then when I get to Greece, what I get are a litany of people telling me what a good man he was. And so I was bewildered when I left Crete. I had such complex, competing, and all equally present emotions at once.

What it helped me do was recognize that my father was not wholly evil. And it would be so much easier if evil people were just evil. It's so much more complex to reconcile that he was thought of as not just a good man, but a great man.

It's so difficult for me to imagine him as a child because in my imagination, he still looms larger than life. He's a force of terror for me. But for those folks, I mean, he left when he was 18. They'd known the child version of him. Maybe he was kind to his sisters. I really needed to reconcile with the complexity of him as a human being.

Evil and great are ends of a spectrum and a lot of humanity lies in the center. I absolutely had wonderful experiences with my father. He would deal blackjack to my brother and I on New Year's Eve and we would laugh and joke and he'd throw hands and let us win and

You know, we would eat Vasilopita, which is a bread that has a quarter baked into it, and whoever gets the quarter has good luck, right? Like, we had all of these traditions, and some of them were genuinely lovely. But that gets overshadowed by trauma when the trauma is so intense. And I did not know how to hold all of those pieces at the same time. What I knew was that something big was shifting inside of me.

I'm not so sure that my questions in Greece really were ever about my father. I think that they were about me and where I'd come from. They have to be, because otherwise I would feel intense dissatisfaction because all I walked away with was mythology. Greece gave me a number of gifts, but one of the primary gifts was it gave me the opposite of a panic disorder.

I felt moments of existential calm that I had never felt before. And just touching those, I knew then that it was possible for that to be my norm.

because I have the capacity to touch it from time to time. I can feel my body quiet. I can feel my mind quiet. That means I can work toward that being a more permanent and present state for me. When I got my first academic job, it was a visiting writer position.

in Indiana. And I was working on the story of all of this material, which would become my memoir. And I still hadn't really learned any self-care. And I was in a new relationship with a man who would become my husband and then eventually become my ex-husband.

There was a night I'd finished working on an earlier draft of this memoir that I'd been writing and writing for years, just rewriting it. We toasted the completion of it with some scotch. We proceeded to drink the rest of the scotch and then probably some tequila and some beers. And then I had a panic attack while drunk, and that had never happened before. That was the one thing I knew

would surely keep me from the panic and the anxiety of this drinking. And when that failed me, my life spun it quickly out of control. I'd been working on this material and triggering myself every step of the way because I hadn't really done a lot of the trauma work yet. I did it a year, a year and a half in Tallahassee, but trust me, that barely scratched the surface. And now my primary coping mechanism was taken away.

And then my partner got sober and I used it as an opportunity to finally close that chapter. And so now I think this past summer, I've passed seven years of sobriety. But I had to stay really present in the noise of my trauma because I had nothing to help me.

keep it quiet. And learning how to do that, it's among the most important things I've ever learned how to do, but it was really difficult. It was really hard to just sit with myself all the time. I stopped working on the book and did intensive trauma therapy for three and a half years.

I think probably the best decision that I made. And I worked really hard to rewire parts of my brain that had been deeply entrenched, like those neural pathways were trenches. The thing about healing is it's not a destination. It is a process and it's ongoing. The kind of wounds that I sustained so young and continue to sustain, I will always be recovering from them.

I still have deep cycles of darkness, but I have such a full emotional and psychological and spiritual toolbox to get myself back to balance, to keep myself in flow, grounded, and present, not only for myself, but for the people in my life. And that is a practice.

I think that the opposite of fear is curiosity. And so when I'm feeling out of balance or a little destabilized, the first question I ask is, what am I afraid of in this? What is setting off a fear response? And when I can identify whatever is setting off a fear response for me, then I can gently hold it and inspect it from a lot of sides and figure out how to shift and pivot

So that micro-shifting and pivoting that I once did out of hypervigilance is exactly the tool that has allowed me to shift and vary real time, shift and pivot toward a healthier self who feels good and a life, I hope, in which I'm making meaning and helping others.

Maybe in 2016, 2017, I started considering, rather than the curse of trauma, I started considering the phrase, the gifts of trauma. I wouldn't wish trauma on anyone, but it also has given me some gifts.

One of those gifts is I can spot a person who has had similar experiences to me and that ability to connect, to sort of find that family also has enabled me to help a lot of people in the world. And I think makes me a better teacher as well. I have a little sister from the Big Brother Big Sisters program. The help I'm able to give her is absolutely trauma-informed help. She has a reliable adult showing up in her life.

That's the gift. Because I think for those of us who endured especially ongoing abuse, we weren't seen. Helping someone feel seen, feel heard, sometimes for the first time, is indeed a remarkable gift.

Today's episode featured Lisa Nicolidakis. You can read much more about this story in her incredible memoir, No One Crosses the Wolf. You can also find out more about Lisa and check out her other award-winning essays at lisanicolidakis.com. That's L-I-S-A-N-I-K-O-L-I-D-A-K-I-S dot com.

From Wondery, you're listening to This Is Actually Happening. If you love what we do, please rate and review the show. You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, or on the Wondery app to listen ad-free and get access to the entire back catalog. In the episode notes, you'll find some links and offers from our sponsors. By supporting them, you help us bring you our show for free. I'm your host, Witt Misseldein.

Today's episode was co-produced by me with special thanks to the This Is Actually Happening team, including Ellen Westberg. The intro music features the song Illabi by Tipper. You can join the community on the This Is Actually Happening discussion group on Facebook or follow us on Instagram at ActuallyHappening.

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