All About Bipolar

Posted By atorturedsoul on December 7, 2009

My moods have been all over the place for the past few days and it all stems from confusion. An event occurred last week and I don’t know exactly how I feel about it and it is causing me a lot of grief.

In order to explain it, I will have to give you a little history. Years ago, a close relative of mine (I’m not going to say which relative in the interest of privacy.) made friends with one of the neighbors, who seemed to adore her children. I only met this man a time or two and something about him made me uneasy but I couldn’t figure out what it was. Over the next few years, this man became a close friend of my relative’s and babysat the children quite often.

My father moved in with this relative when they moved several hours away. The man made the trip to stay with them for a while and the result was devastating to my family. My father was a very ill man and had been for over 30 years. His health was not good but he was managing. He told me what happened in that house right before he died and I am still haunted by it and always will be.

My dad and the man were both sitting in the living room with one of the children. Dad went into the kitchen to get another cup of coffee and when he came back, he found the man molesting the child. He snapped and was blinded by rage, as I imagine most people would be. Without thinking, he walked up behind the man and took his coffee mug and struck him as hard as he could across the back of his head. The man immediately fell to the floor and was comatose for three days.

Here is the kicker: My father was initially charged with attempted murder, but ended up with aggravated assault. He spent several weeks in a jail cell and was refused medical care. (He had Crohn’s and had an eliostomy and required regular care and a balanced diet.) He dehydrated and was extremely ill upon his release. He never fully recovered from it. An act intended to save a child left him on house arrest for over a year and he died on probation. He was a convicted felon and had to carry a card stating he was a violent offender. Mind you, he weighed 86 pounds. To this day, he is still listed as a felon on the state website. There is a note beside the entry-Dead. It’s painful to know this and I have asked for the governor to remove it or at least change it to deceased but I have not been successful.

What happened to the man? Nothing. He received no charges whatsoever and came back to the area that I live in. Not long after he returned, he was caught (in the act) molesting a three month old infant. He was arrested but was transferred to a nursing home due to a heart condition. My father was ill and was kept in jail and placed on house arrest for aggravated assault. This man was caught molesting a child-twice-and he was sent to a nursing home and even had a relationship with another patient.

I remember my father telling me just two weeks before he died that he hit him as hard as he could. He told me he tried to kill him, but he wasn’t strong enough and he wished that he had been. It was the most horrible thing he had ever had to see in his entire life. “I tried to kill him, Amy,” he told me. “I tried my best.” Just thinking of his words hurts me so bad, because I know I would have done the same thing if I had been in his shoes and I could only imagine the image imprinted in his mind. In his last month, he knew he was going to die and his only regret was that he didn’t kill that man so he couldn’t hurt any more children. It turned out that the man had been convicted of molestation almost twenty years before and was not supposed to be around children at all. I have learned that he molested many children over the years.

How does this story end? My father passed away on New Year’s Day of 2008. That man died last week and never spent time for his crimes. My father died a convicted felon and violent offender while he died in a nursing home receiving around the clock care in a facility where young children visited older relatives. Where is the justice in this? There is none.

My initial reaction when I learned of his death was one of elation. I do not feel bad for admitting this. I said, “It couldn’t have happened to a nicer person.” I am not ashamed of my reaction. Several hours later, my joy was replaced by a wave of different emotions that I couldn’t deal with. I became angry. He lived almost two years longer than my dad. He never spent time in jail, on house arrest or on probation like my dad and he got two more years on this earth than my father. It’s not fair. He should have died when my father struck him. He should have been punished for what he did to all of those children. I became enraged and then I became sad. The children he hurt never received justice and it was not because of my father’s failure to kill him. It was because the justice system didn’t want to pursue charges against a sick man. My father was sick and they had no problem leaving him in a jail cell until he was near death.

My father’s words came back to me and I felt sorry for him as he was sorry that he couldn’t have spared that infant from being harmed. I was sick to my stomach thinking of how my father was hurt by what he witnessed that day. I was angry that my father paid such a hefty price for what I deemed an act of heroism. I was angry that this man didn’t have to pay and I was sorry that he died of natural causes. I was livid that I would never be able to confront this man and tell him how bad he hurt my family. I wanted to tell him to his face that I wished my father had killed him. Part of me wanted to hurt him and I am not sorry for that either.

Here I am today and I am confused and angry. Do I feel sorry for his family? Not in the least. They defended him then, even knowing that he had molested one of his own grandchildren years before this happened. Do I feel guilty for my feelings? I do not…and maybe I should, but I do not. Does this make me a horrible person? Probably, because I wished my father had killed him and I regret that I didn’t have that chance. Alas, I feel no guilt for these thoughts. I only hear my father’s words as he described what happened that day and I am angry all over again.

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Categories: My Personal Experiences
Tags: about, all, anger, bipolar, disorder, molestation, pedophile