A personal essay about confronting family violence, alcoholism, and the courage it takes to face generational trauma and break cycles of shame for the next generation
I spent months trying to pitch pieces to different publications, and the only one that got accepted was a piece on letting my hair go gray in NextAvenue. It’s a great publication, the editor was so pleasant to work with, and I was honored to have them give me a byline.
But hope is a dangerous thing. I had hoped that one piece would lead to another and that more of my submissions would start getting accepted. I was sure that when I sent this pitch along that it would at least illicit a, “send it on spec.”
Dear XXXX,
You were great in XXXX’s class, and I hope you’ll be interested in my piece, “My Uncle Killed His Brother in a Drunken Fight. The Murder Fueled My Shame of Being Irish.”
When I was in 6th grade, my uncle Donny stabbed his brother David to death in a drunken fight. The story aired on the local news, and I distinctly remember my mother saying, “I’m so glad my last name isn’t McLaughlin anymore.”
It was the first time I felt embarrassed by my family’s ancestry. Then Donny went to jail. For most of my life, I associated these unspeakable acts with being Irish. It wasn’t until I found the courage to share my family secrets that I was able to take pride in my heritage.
I have a piece forthcoming in Next Avenue, and my earlier work has been published CSO Online and Dark Reading.
Thanks,
It turns out, the Irish aren’t so lucky.
But I wrote this story for a reason, so I’m sharing it here in hopes that another human being reads it and feels a sense of relief in knowing that someone else experience some family trauma that caused great shame. It took me a long time to understand that I get to define me—not anyone or anything else.
“Family pathology rolls from generation to generation like a fire in the woods taking down everything in its path until one person, in one generation, has the courage to turn and face the flames. That person brings peace to his ancestors and spares the children that follow.”
My uncle Donny stabbed his brother David to death in a drunken fight.
I was in sixth grade. We were playing downstairs in the basement, and my mother came down in tears.
“I need to go to my mother’s house. There’s been an accident,” she said.
By the time she came home, the story of her family was on the news.
My mother explained that David had gotten angry. Donny had to defend himself. He used a kitchen knife to fend off his brother’s attack.
“Is Grammy ok?”
“She got knocked down but she’s ok.”
“Is Donny in trouble?”
“He’s probably going to have to go to jail for a little while. Even though he was defending himself, what he did was wrong.”
I still remember the darkness of night behind the newscaster who stood in front of a cruiser with flashing lights.
“David McLaughlin stabbed his brother,” she said.
“Oh, thank god our last name is McLaughlin,” my mother said. “No one will know that it’s my family.”
My mother was the youngest of eight children and the only girl. Too young to be the subject of sibling rivalry, she instead grew up in the shadows of her mother, adopting the weight of her responsibilities and the classic traits of an enabler. The two brothers closest to her in age were the most burdensome. Even as grown men, they still lived with their mother.
They were alcoholics, as was her father. One was a violent drunk, the other a passive drunk. We never really knew David, the violent drunk, but Uncle Donny always came to our house for holiday dinners. Donny was in his forties with dark hair, greased back like the Fonz from Happy Days. It was difficult to understand a lot of what he said because he mumbled. His life was terribly lonely, which made my mother very sad. She worried for him. He drove an 18-wheeler truck, so he spent a lot of time in rest stations. He brought us bags full of the stuffed animals that you win from that claw machine at truck stops and arcades. I don’t know if he mastered the game (because it was impossible to win) or if he was in with the guys who stocked the machines. It made him happy to bring us these toys, though.
Several years later, after Donny was released from jail, I received a call at college.
“Your uncle Donny died. He slipped and fell in the shower,” she said.
He lived alone and died alone, naked in the bathtub. I couldn’t let my mother clean up her brother’s shit from the tub, so I took on that job. While scouring the tiles with bleach, I was struck by the sadness of my uncle’s lonely life. In the end, all he had in the whole world were stacks of old newspapers, ashtrays full of cigarette butts, and a pile of shit in his tub.
My mother’s strength has always been in her hands. They look like good, strong hands. They were working hands, wrinkled and dry. She has long, skinny fingers with curved nails, always unpolished, giant knuckles and overgrown cuticles. Her hands could tell a thousand stories of all the lives that she had touched: the four children she diapered, the husband she nurtured, the floors she scoured, the homes of her deceased mother and brothers that she packed away into boxes without shedding a single tear because in times of crisis one doesn’t cry.
“I’m not the kind of person to go to therapy,” my mother says every time I suggest she try talking to someone. Unlike me, my mother never talked to anyone about her family trauma–not even her friends. She buried her brothers and soldiered on, keeping the memories tightly locked away so as not to confront her shame.
Meanwhile, my family history gnawed at me, and as I got older, I realized how much keeping secrets taught me that something was wrong with us. That we had something to hide, which must mean that we were somehow less than everyone else. When I was a high school English teacher, I taught Dante’s Inferno. As we delved deeper into the bowels of Hell, I’d ask students to think about what modern day ‘sinners’ Dante might place in each of the circles. One year, as we got to the first layer of the 9th circle, I proceeded with caution knowing that one student’s family had made the papers for filicide. So many skeletons in so many closets. I hoped if I exposed mine, it might help my students understand that the idea of the perfect family is a fallacy.
“Well, here is where I might find my Uncle Donny,” I said. “He killed his brother. I share that because I was embarrassed that this was my family for many years.”
We’d go on to talk about the same uneasiness Dante felt in examining the world around him. Human behavior transcends time and generation. My family was not the first, nor will it be the last, to be mortified by the violent acts of a loved one.
But look where my hands are now. At 51 years-old, my fingers still dance and swirl around the keyboard searching for the keys to finally unlock generations of shame. Relational life therapist, Terry Real, said, “Family pathology rolls from generation to generation like a fire in the woods taking down everything in its path until one person, in one generation, has the courage to turn and face the flames. That person brings peace to his ancestors and spares the children that follow.”
In the hopes of sparing my own children, I’ve spent decades in therapy talking through my own feelings of shame trying to find the courage to face the flames. Being honest about the stories of our family’s past releases them into the world and hopefully brings peace to my mother, my daughters, and me.
Check out my previous post to read more about my grandmother.
Read: Learning to Let Go: What My Grandmother Taught Me Years After She Died