Chapter 13 - MY FATHER
I visited his grave.
Not for advice.
Dead people are terrible conversational partners.
I brought the childhood notebook copy.
Sat on grass.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
Wind.
Nothing.
Then I remembered.
He had.
Not in words I understood.
When I was fifteen, Mom and I argued because I used inhaler before basketball.
Dad said:
“Take the damn medicine.”
Mom:
“He doesn’t need it yet.”
Dad:
“You don’t get points for waiting until he can’t breathe.”
I had laughed because my parents were fighting.
Then used inhaler.
There.
A sentence I had forgotten.
You don’t get points for waiting.
He knew.
Maybe not everything.
Enough.
I called my aunt, Dad’s sister.
She remembered fights.
“Your mother hated medicine.”
“Why?”
“Her brother had been sickly as a kid. Their mother treated him like porcelain. Bernice swung too far the other way.”
Generational origin.
Not excuse.
Then:
“Did she ever hurt me?”
My aunt paused.
“I saw her make you finish things when you were wheezing.”
“Did you report?”
“This was thirty years ago, Griffin.”
“That’s not answer.”
“No.”
There.
People see pieces.
Do nothing.
Later regret.
Same as Colette’s first incident, though stakes/context different.
I stopped searching for one villainous origin.
Bernice had learned something from her family.
Adapted.
Reinforced.
Then taught me.
Then Elodie.
The chain did not make her innocent.
It showed why chains continue.
Someone has to decide:
This stops with me.
That sentence sounds dramatic until stopping requires boring things.
Passwords.
Medication counts.
Therapy.
Apologies.
Not hitting.
Listening when a seven-year-old says:
May you like
I can’t breathe.
That was the actual break in the chain.
