During the last months I was writing and reporting No Visible Bruises, my stepmother went into hospice. She’d been diagnosed with colorectal cancer in the summer of 2015 and died in September of 2017. About three weeks before she died, I was sitting beside her hospital bed in the home she shared with my father, when she told me her first marriage and her childhood home had both been abusive. (This childhood abuse did not come from her mother, who raised her after her father left.) She and my father had been married for thirty-eight years; I’d been researching domestic violence in America for nearly eight years by then. I was utterly shocked.
For years we hadn’t been close, but more recently we’d found a way to come together. Why had she never told me? Had I not made a safe enough space for her to talk about it? There were so many questions I wished I could have asked her, but she put me off, wisely. She didn’t want to talk about it, and in fairness, by the time she’d divulged this information I knew far more about domestic violence than most people. Whatever memories she refused to share, I could imagine anyway. She knew she was dying, and she didn’t want to think about any of the dark chapters of her life. She was entirely focused on my father, on the pain her death would cause us, and on not being able to see her grandchildren grow up.
If someone I’d known for thirty-eight years could keep her abuse from me, what did it say about how we deal with abuse in our midst today, the shame and stigma it still carries? When she finally died, my father and I stood in the kitchen sobbing. It was the second time I’d witnessed this specific scene, my father crying over a wife lost too young to cancer, but this time I was an adult and I understood so much more—of what she’d gone through, of what he was going through. He apologized to me that day and for the next weeks every time he broke down for “not being stronger.” Here was a man who’d just lost his second wife to cancer and yet he didn’t feel he had a right to public tears. Why? I told him his tears made him stronger, in my eyes, as a man, as a husband, as a father, that he didn’t fear his full range of human emotion. It’s a lesson I wish I could impart to all men.
It is for these reasons, these two moments, one with my stepmother and one with my father, that I dedicate this book to her. I am grateful I was able to tell her that I was doing so before she died.