WomensStuff

This is going to sound harsh, and part of this is because I'm still processing the information involved so there are some raw nerves.

The father of a dear (male) friend of mine in Canada died two days ago. I found out today, but it wasn't a surprise. He'd been in palliative care for the past month.

Now the thing is that this father was a bastard. A complete and utter abusive, manipulative, gaslighting piece of shit. He abused both of his children, messing one of them up to astonishing levels and the other (my friend) to the point that he has a few … let's call it "social skills issues" and leave it at that. He also abused my friend's wife (another dear friend) and their adoptive Chinese daughter. (The friend is a Russian immigrant, his wife is Scottish-descended, and there's a plethora of children and step-children in the mix ranging from half-indigenous to plain white, to this adopted Chinese girl. It's a complicated household.) But that being said, I'm not crass enough to celebrate this death, nor am I going to say that his death is what gives me hope.

No, it's his wife that gives me hope.

His long-suffering (Ukrainian) wife, who most people thought was agoraphobic because she expressed raw terror at leaving home, who always wore a housecoat around the house seemingly as a ward against being invited out anywhere, who knew nothing of the household finances, etc. has, within two days of her terrorizing husband's death, come out of her shell. In her eighties she's setting foot outside the house again. She's dressing up. She's going to market places and gushing over puppies and children. Because it turns out her "agoraphobia" was her husband flatly denying her permission to leave the house. The housecoat thing? He insisted on it "to save laundry costs". She'd been kept, essentially, as a terrorized slave for decades in that home and nobody knew it. (Not even my friend's wife who has very sharp instincts for this kind of thing, herself being an abuse victim at the hands of her mother.)

But only two days after her monstrous abuser's death, she, in her eighties (!), is stepping out into the world unflinching and unafraid and finally getting a taste of joy once more. Which is, to me, a hope-filled glimpse of the future: no matter how dark the life, there's always hope for joy in it eventually.