That Which Was Lost

David Reynolds
Jul 21, 2017 · 12 min read

No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, the good that he seeks.

-Mary Shelley

….

We all sat down at the beginning of the hour in chairs that faced each other.

There were seven or eight of us, including two brothers in their 40’s who had been repeatedly molested and beaten by their father.

The lead therapist asked, “Does anyone want to start our session tonight?”

Folded in my back pocket were four pages I had written a few months earlier when I was 22.

One of the brothers said, “I’d like to talk…”

The woman with multiple personality disorder whimpered and angled her shoulders toward the back of her chair. Her attendant was tense.

Every week I hoped no one would trigger her.

Tonight, I would be the one that did.

….

When I was 22, a friend told me that she had been raped at a party when she was in college.

It was all I could think of. I was constantly agitated. When I tried to sleep, I couldn’t. I was anxious during the day and sleepless at night. I slept fitfully for a few hours and then laid awake until the morning. I couldn’t find a position comfortable for sleep. I felt a constant sense of dread. Whenever I awakened, my chest felt compressed from within and my blood surged with an inexplicable acidic feeling. After three weeks, I was an exhausted, emotional mess.

A close friend with a talent for direct questions asked, “Have you ever been in a sexual situation where you felt you had no control?”

Before I could say “No,” Franklin Waugh’s apartment sprung from the cold storage of memory and every detail of his kitchen and living room displayed clearly in my mind.

I wasn’t ready to say “Yes,” so I played dumb.

“Why do you ask?”

“It’s normal to have intense reactions when you learn of an assault against someone you care for. But your reaction seems out of scale to me. It’s possible this has more to do with you than it does with her.”

….

I don’t know what Franklin Waugh’s childhood was like. I don’t know what he did for a living before he became the landlord of our seven-unit complex of small apartments in Phoenix. My parents were in a trial separation and lived five or six blocks from each other on the same street. This arrangement gave mom the illusion that dad was trying to make it work.

Franklin was probably born in the 1920’s or ’30’s and married a woman who had died before he and I met. He talked about her often, though I didn’t understand most of what he said.

“I could never marry another woman. It wouldn’t feel right.”

More likely, Franklin’s marrying days were long past him.

He was lonely and needed me to listen and be his friend for a couple of hours each day.

Franklin gave me food and companionship at a time when my mom was unmoored and incapable of managing her own life, much less mine. When I came home from school, I went to his unit in our complex to have a sandwich, play a couple rounds of Go Fish and watch TV. His apartment was tidy and everything had a place. The sounds of game shows and soap operas quietly filled the space with background noise.

I wished mom and I had furniture as nice as his. Our apartment was sparse: we had a two-person dining table, a small couch and we both slept on mattresses placed on the floors of our rooms with no box springs or frame. Apparently, “trial separation” meant “You two are on your own.”

….

As one of the brothers talked, I repeatedly reached to feel the folded pages in my back pocket. They were my script, my backup plan. I wasn’t confident I could tell the story without reading them.
A couple pages were pretentious, unrecognizable attempts to counterfeit Faulkner and Steinbeck. They described vague images that let me step to the edge of what happened without fully describing it. I wrote in third-person to further distance myself. I could admit it happened but perhaps it happened to someone else. Maybe if the details were inaccurate, it could be proved to have never happened.

“David, you brought something to share with us?”

I reached back for the pages and looked at the creases for a few moments before I flattened them on my knee.

“This is something I wrote called, ‘That Which Was Lost.’”

I read out loud the words I had written about a family friend who used me to find pleasure she buried underneath her sarcastic rage. “Aunt Brenda” hated me outside her bedroom but pulled me into a perverted intimacy inside it. She screeched criticism of everything I did in all the rooms of her house except this one. In this room, she moaned instead of yelled. When I was in her bed, she was at least nicer to me.


Mom and I lived in the mother-in-law unit connected to Brenda’s house. A woman a few years younger than my mom lived with us. The friend liked to read Dr. Seuss and Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day to me while I sat under her nightgown and looked at her freckled nakedness.

….

I visited Franklin’s apartment after school as every other weekday. I could tell something was off about him. He was nervous and fidgety as he made lunch and didn’t ask questions about my day. He had made his decision and I wasn’t old enough to have learned to trust my radar.

After we ate, he cleared our plates from the table and molested me. He told me to suck it like a straw. I could see the cloudless sky through his kitchen window. I also saw his open front door but I didn’t try to run. Where could I go? He had keys to any place I could hide.

The second time, he wordlessly pointed down.

The third time, I was listening to Eric Clapton’s 461 Ocean Boulevard. It was released in 1974, so that made me around eight years old.
Each apartment had a 4’x4’ lockable outdoor storage closet. It was my hiding place to be alone, where I listened to Clapton’s cassette over and over.

Mom had left me alone yet again on this night and Franklin surprised me by opening the closet with his key. A street light blinded me as he closed the door and pushed on the back of my head.
I used the closet to escape from my mom but it didn’t protect me from my friend.

….

Franklin and I continued to spend time together but I have no other memories of abuse besides the three assaults. I have a clear memory of the details of his apartment except for the hallway that led to his bedroom and bathroom.

Prior to turning 50, I never considered directing my memory toward the hallway. Only recently have I noticed that blackness is all I remember. I wonder why it’s black but so far, I have no answers. Those may come later.

You can pursue the damage and its consequences. When you are ready, it will find you and upend your world with faded Kodachrome memories and vibrant, persistent pain.

You may feel you’re not ready but when the pain arrives, you have no choice. It comes when it decides you’re ready for its momentum: a large, compressed mass, which builds its slow power over the years. You know you’re ready when the pain comes. You feel like it will destroy you and it might — not everyone survives its power. Take comfort in the knowledge that when the pain arrives — a freight on rails — you’re ready.

You have to trust this truth because you won’t believe it for many years. When you look back, you’ll realize the pain wasted no time: as soon as you were ready, it arrived.

….

I loved Franklin and he loved me. I felt this way even after he molested me.

I don’t have any illusions about the severity of his actions. He stole a lot from me and twisted up what he left behind. I continued to spend time with him after he abused me because he otherwise took good care of me. Besides, where else could I go? Who could I trust to help me? My parents — the two people I was supposed to be able to trust — weren’t around.

Franklin was compassionate enough to tell me, “She didn’t really mean it. It was more a cry for help,” after my mom made a half-assed attempt to kill herself by putting her head in our oven.

My mom didn’t want to die.
She wanted to be loved.

….

Many of our decisions are oriented around finding relief from the pain of life instead of finding ways to give and receive love. Relief often feels more crucial than love and all humans tend to gravitate to what relieves them. Relief feels better because it covers over the pain that saturates so much of life.

Franklin believed his life would be better if I sucked it like a straw.

….

My first counselor’s name was Melody. She was the one who invited me to group counseling. During our one-on-one sessions, I put a lot of energy into understanding how being abused had affected the way I viewed myself, other people and sex.

Peter Gabriel’s song, Digging In the Dirt, was released during this season in my life. It became my theme song. I connected with it because Gabriel’s images brought clarity to how I felt about the effects of sexual abuse.

The song possesses a sense of urgency about digging below the surface to find instances of damage. Gabriel’s metaphor conveys value in finding old pain and reliving it again so that its power to destroy can be minimized.

You need to dig in the dirt of the mind, of feelings, of the body. It’s not a solo effort. It needs to be done with the support of others. I had that support because, rather than hide my abuse, I spoke about it. I was amazed and saddened to learn how many people had experiences similar to mine. Knowing the abusive histories of people in my life eased the burden of recovery. It also reinforced in me the importance about being open with my history so that others could come to terms with their experiences.

….

This is the most important idea I learned from Melody:

The best way to get rid of a bad feeling is to feel it.

….

People were tense. Bodies were rigid. Breaths were held. No one wanted to talk. It was too much at once. Even the therapists were uncomfortable. Not because of my subject matter but because it was utterly blatant.

“When he unzipped, I saw his small cock and grey hair…”

I stopped to ask the lead therapist, a man in his 60’s, if the pubic hair of older men was grey.

“Yes.”

I hoped the pubic hair of old men would be black or brown or blonde or red. If I had been wrong about the color of his hair then maybe I had imagined the assault.

As I read more of the four pages, the woman with multiple personality disorder switched to the voice of a young child and folded herself into the fetal position on the floor. Her caretaker glared at me because my story made her evening more difficult.

Immediately, the session shifted from listening to me to taking care of her. I resented her antics as well as the therapists’ decision to include her in the group. We couldn’t deal with our own issues for fear of triggering one of her episodes.

This was supposed to be an important evening for me. A time when I could explain what happened to me for the first time to people with similar backgrounds. And this fucked up woman took from me what I needed.
I didn’t go back.

….

The first time I felt the arousal of my first girlfriend, I recognized the sensation. Before I could consciously wonder how this could be, a memory returned and I was a little boy in bed with Aunt Brenda. I was in her bed.

“Touch Aunt Brenda like this,” she said, as she moved my hand between her legs the way she liked.

….

“Yahweh is a compassionate God, slow to anger and rich in faithful love and truth, maintaining faithful love to a thousand generations, forgiving wrongdoing, rebellion and sin. But he will not leave the guilty unpunished, bringing the consequences of the fathers’ wrongdoing on the children and grandchildren to the third and fourth generations.” — Exodus 34:7

Familial dysfunction gains momentum as each successive generation fails to recognize the importance of minimizing its influence. When people marry, they tend to pick mates with similar or complementary dysfunction. Most of the time, the dysfunction is invisible because the behaviors are all a family ever knows. It becomes the unquestioned norm and is handed off to future generations.

It is almost certain that Franklin Waugh descended from a family with a history of sexual abuse. Unless a person becomes aware of the dysfunction and undertakes the substantial burden of stopping its momentum, families are practically doomed to repeat the sins of previous generations.

I decided to do the work necessary to prevent dysfunction from continuing. I wanted it to stop with me. I have seen counselors through many seasons of my life but the most important decision I made was to not have kids. I experimented with other kids when I was young but was never sexually attracted to children as adult.
Neither did I have access to them. Maybe it would be different if I had access. I wasn’t willing to take that risk.

It is difficult to measure the probabilities of a male victim of child sexual abuse becoming an abuser himself. What is known is that male victims have a greater likelihood of becoming abusers than female victims. Studies place the likelihood of a male victim becoming an abuser at ~30%.

Many well-meaning friends from church who knew the reason my wife and I didn’t want to have kids suggested that all we had to do was trust God to prevent anything from happening. Each time someone suggested this naive solution, I wanted to explain that God didn’t seem to have been concerned about stopping three people from abusing me so on what basis did they think God would stop me from abusing someone else? Because I was a good guy at church? Life doesn’t work out that way. God didn’t protect me as a child. Why would I expect him to protect me as a man?

….

In the year I turned 50, two years after my mom died, I directed my focus to Franklin’s influence on my life.

I wondered what his life was like. Maybe emotional intimacy was confusing for him. He loved me and it’s possible I was the only person who loved him at that time. Sometimes, people sexualize love because sex can be the most tangible form of expressing closeness.

Franklin caused serious damage to my life. Yet, people who molest children are not necessarily evil. Many abusers were broken by others through abuse. Though it was impossible to know the truth about his life, I was curious about the history that compelled him to abuse me.

Through the process of asking questions about Franklin and writing about the possible answers, I developed empathy toward him. And then one of the strangest experiences of my life happened.
I said out loud to Franklin, who most assuredly was already dead, “I get it. It’s okay with me. If this is what you needed, I’m okay with it. It’s not good for me but if this is your only way to feel loved, then okay.”

I was confused. What did I mean? At the same time I said the words to him, I felt the dissonance of his actions, the damage he caused, my resentment toward him and this surprising attitude within me. I stopped to ask: Is this really how I feel?

It was more than forgiveness. It was more than acceptance. It was, in a sense, permission to do what he felt compelled to do. Not because it was what I wanted but because it was what he felt he needed in order to feel love.

We all have wrong ideas about love. We demand love and express deeply flawed love because we don’t fully understand it. We think we have to get our fill before we can give love to someone else. We settle for empty counterfeits of love and offer to others the leftovers of our lives. We satisfy ourselves before we nourish others and we hunger and thirst for a quality of love that is difficult to find.
Franklin’s choices broke me. I’ve fixed a lot of what he broke but I don’t think I’ll ever get to a place where there won’t always be something profoundly damaged inside me.

There is no need for me to withhold understanding and acceptance from him. He needed that more than I needed to keep him locked up in guilt. I needed to forgive him more than I needed to resent him.
Am I saying Franklin knows now that I gave him permission and it has somehow affected his life in the present and maybe in the future?

Maybe. I don’t know. That part doesn’t matter.

What matters is this perspective has changed the way I understand Franklin and myself. It matters because I understand a little bit more about love.

Since telling Franklin that it’s okay that he molested me, I have played over and over in my mind what it would be like to meet him again.

I’m happy to see him. I thank him for taking care of me when my mom was unable to and my dad was unwilling. I hug him. I also sit down with him and tell him how his choices affected me. Not to blame him but to show him that my life was difficult and painful in part because of what he did.

I make sure he knows he’s forgiven.

)
Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade