Thanksgiving in 2008, What Many

¶ … Thanksgiving in 2008, what many people would deem a tragedy occurred in my family. My step-grandmother shot and killed my grandfather. She used two guns and a total of seven bullets. The whole episode was witnessed by an off-duty police officer, a man who was theoretically a friend of both my grandfather and his wife, but who also happened to be the husband of my grandfather's mistress. After eighteen months of deliberation, the prosecutor decided not to charge my step-grandmother with a crime.

For many families, this would seem like a denial of justice, and many people in my family felt like it was exactly that. Some of my aunts and uncles spent time and money that they did not have, trying to pursue first a criminal, and then a civil judgment against my grandfather's killer. My mother did not. Her father had been an extremely physically and emotionally abusive man to my mother, her siblings, and my grandmother.

My grandmother had actually shot him, once, in self-defense, 25 years prior to my stepmother shooting and killing him. My grandfather physically abused his second wife and her children. While he did not appear to be the one to initiate violence on the day of his death, there was little doubt in anyone's mind that he had a history of extreme violence towards her.

Why do I tell this story? Without revealing the lessons it taught me, the only things that it reveals about me are that I come from a family with a history of major dysfunction, and that I apparently have enough insight to recognize that dysfunction. However, when multiple people in the same family shoot another family member, it probably does not require a social scientist to point out that the family is battling some dysfunction. The odd thing is that I did not realize my family was dysfunctional.

I never met my grandfather. My grandmother left him, put my mom and her siblings into counseling, and worked very hard to break the cycle of abuse in the family. So, the family that I grew up in is one that was, essentially, free from abuse. There were some substance use problems in my extended family, but nothing resulting in incarceration or intervention, just the problem drinking and recreational drug use that seem to mark the typical American family.

Furthermore, if my Mom and her siblings seemed vehement when they heard stories about family violence, I never thought of their reactions as extreme. After all, should not all people be outraged when a child is beaten to death? However, my grandfather's death brought up issues that the family had failed to address. Some of my mom's siblings mourned my grandfather, though he had not been a regular part of their lives for a period of more than 20 years.

They complained that my step-grandmother had deprived them of the opportunity to get an apology from their father. My mother disagreed with her siblings, firmly believing that her father had had almost a quarter of a decade to apologize to them and had failed to do so; he was the one who gave up his chance to apologize. When her siblings decided to file a wrongful death suit, my mother backed away from the dispute.

She told her kids that she had made a choice years before between happiness and having her father in her life, and the circumstances of his death did not change the circumstances of his life. A year after this suit, I see my aunts and uncles struggling with the emotional and financial aftermath of an unsuccessful lawsuit, and I understand why my mother backed away from the dispute. She made me realize that sometimes in life; the healthiest thing is for a person to walk away from someone.

That does not preclude forgiveness, because forgiveness is not the same thing as reconciliation. Instead, what it means is that a.