When you hear the word “grandparents”, what comes into your mind?
For me, it’s someone who loves their grandchildren unconditionally. And they just want to GIVE all the time. There’s some truth to the phrase “If Mom and Dad say no, go ask Grandma!”.
“Grandma” brings up an image of an older woman, in the kitchen baking cookies. “Grandpa” means the old man out in the garage, tinkering with the lawn mower and having me “help” by handing him a wrench or a screwdriver.
But those are just stereotypes. And sometimes real life doesn’t match up with the way we commonly think of how grandparents are supposed to be.
As a little girl, Gwen saw her grandparents all the time. And she knew her grandpa could sometimes be a not very nice person.
Then one day, Gwen’s grandma decided she’d had enough.
Content warning: this episode includes discussion of gun violence.
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https://WhatWasThatLike.com/facebook
Full show notes and pictures for this episode are here:
https://WhatWasThatLike.com/213
Graphics for this episode by Bob Bretz. Transcription was done by James Lai.
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Episode transcript (download transcript PDF):
Please consult the show notes for content warnings about this episode.
When you hear the word “grandparents”, what comes into your mind?
For me, it’s someone who loves their grandchildren unconditionally. And they just want to GIVE all the time. There’s some truth to the phrase “If Mom and Dad say no, go ask Grandma!”.
“Grandma” brings up an image of an older woman, in the kitchen baking cookies. “Grandpa” means the old man out in the garage, tinkering with the lawn mower and having me “help” by handing him a wrench or a screwdriver.
But those are just stereotypes. And sometimes real life doesn’t match up with the way we commonly think of how grandparents are supposed to be.
As a little girl, Gwen saw her grandparents all the time. And she knew her grandpa could sometimes be a not very nice person.
Then one day, Gwen’s grandma decided she’d had enough.
Scott
What was it like when you were 10 years old? You lived right next door to your grandparents. Did you visit them often? Were you close with them emotionally? Can you just describe that relationship?
Gwen
It was really tight-knit growing up. First of all, they were built-in babysitters. My parents both worked nine to fives, so I’d usually get off the bus there 50% of the time. I would have dinner at their house to settle in, watch TV, and do my homework over there. Grandma and grandpa would come over all the time to– yeah. I think I saw them not every day, but just about every day. My parents would be working on house projects with them, splitting wood, so they were very involved in the home life.
Scott
It seems like that’s something that grandparents would want to have – the grandkids right next door. You can catch them anytime but then send them home, you know?
Gwen
Exactly. It’s like a kid but the best part about it is that they get to go home at the end of the day. It was interesting. It was definitely an experience that a lot of my friends didn’t have in terms of– I grew up in a pretty rural area. If my parents wanted to go spend the evening at my grandparents’ house or they wanted to go out or something, I feel like I got a bit more independence early on just because we had those watchful eyes next door.
Scott
They had been married for 50 years. That’s just an incredibly long time. Is this your mom’s side or your dad’s side?
Gwen
These are my mom’s parents.
Scott
Okay.
Gwen
Yep. They had been married for 50 years. My grandfather’s family were off the boat, Italian immigrants. My grandfather was a police officer in our town for a few years. He and my grandma ran a small business in town for many years as well. It was a gun supply and fishing tackle shop. So they were really involved in the community and really spent their entire lives in what was my hometown.
Scott
Okay, let’s talk about that day. Your mom and your grandma were planning to go out. What were they going to do?
Gwen
It was some sort of Friday night event for the local club they belonged to – I think it was the Rotary Club. It wasn’t often that my grandmother got to go out. It wasn’t often that either my grandma or grandpa went out. My grandpa was a huge homebody. My grandma kind of got to go out when grandpa said she could. So she and my mom were planning on going out that evening.
I had just gotten home from school. I was playing a video game in the living room. And mind you, I grew up an only child, so it was just me and my parents in the house. So I’m in the living room playing a video game on the TV. At some point, my mom comes in and she says, “Hey honey, your plans for the evening have changed. You and your godmother – she lived down the road – you guys are going to go spend the evening together. Just go out, do your thing.”
So I get up from my game, I go into the dining room, and I look out the window over to my grandparents’ house. There’s five cop cars parked along the street and, instantly, I’m surprised. Obviously, my mom just waved her hand, whisked me away. My godmom arrived. As I’m walking out the door, I see that my mom’s sister – my aunt – and uncle have arrived at the house, and I just say to my mom, “Oh, what are they doing here? What are they doing here?” My mom has her hands, like, on my back, pushing me into the car with my godmom and saying, “Oh, I’m just having some friends over.” My godmom and I, we take off. And again, we’re rudderless, we’re both clueless as to what’s going on.
Scott
So she didn’t know what’s going on either at that point?
Gwen
No. Neither of us knew what was going on. All I had known was that there was a police presence over at my grandparents’ house, and my family’s coming in and they’re stressed. They look very stressed. From about 5 PM till I’ll say about 9 PM, we kind of floated around Walmart, blah, blah, blah, blah. At some point, I’m like, “Can I go home yet?” And she said, “No, you’re not allowed to go home yet.” So we went back to her house. We watched a movie and I asked her, “Do you have any idea what’s going on?”
I had started to get some inklings in my head. I’m like, “Why would there be such a big police presence there? Did you know what have I seen on TV before? Did Grandpa snap and hurt grandma? Did grandma snap and hurt grandpa or something like that?” But neither of us had any idea what was going on.
Finally, at some point into the night, I was allowed to come back home. By then, the commotion had cleared up. It was just my mom and dad back at home. They sat me down and they told me that grandpa had passed away, and they explained the police presence by saying, “When somebody passes away at home, understandably, the police have to come and do an investigation and make sure everything is okay.” So that’s how they explained that.
Scott
Was that satisfying to you as a 10-year-old?
Gwen
I chose to accept it. I mean, this was the first death I had experienced in my family, short of family pets. This was the first loved one of mine who had passed away and I knew things were going to change. I mean, my grandparents live next door. Now, it’s just grandma, no more grandpa. So, I began to reconcile with the first death of a loved one that I had experienced. My parents were incredibly consoling, understanding that I’m a little girl, that this is the first time I’m experiencing this, and just trying to help me through that the best way that they can.
Scott
That’s interesting because they were going through it the same at the same time. They had just learned about this as well.
Gwen
Yeah. My mom had just lost her dad and we were about to face a really big change. So that’s how they had addressed it the night that it happened. So things kind of went on as normal. I was a studious kid. I wanted to go back to school on Monday, so I had a note saying, “Gwen’s grandfather passed away.” And got consolation from my teachers. At the end of the week, about seven days after I had found out that my grandpa had passed – again, I’m playing another video game this time on the computer – my parents come in and they say, “Gwen, we’ve got to tell you something. Come over, sit down on the couch.” And I said, “Well, can you just tell me while I’m still playing my game?” And they said, “No. Come, sit down on the couch.” So I sat down. They sit on either side of me and they tell me, “Grandpa didn’t pass away from natural causes. Grandma killed him.” And I absorbed that and I went upstairs and I sat in my room and I tried to reconcile with the idea of that.
Come to find out what had happened was my grandparents had gotten into an argument pertaining to my grandmother going out that night. My grandpa went down to take a nap on the couch. At some point, my grandmother, I fully believe in a catatonic state, got one of her handguns, sat down in the rocking chair next to the couch that he was laying on, and shot him once in the back of the head. After she had done that, she called my mom. My mom went over to the house, was with my grandmother. She smelled gunpowder. She called my dad. She said, “Get over here.” So while my mom was tending to my grandmother, my dad went over to my grandfather, and yeah, he was dead. From there, my mom made the 911 call. The police showed up.
Scott
What do you remember about the conversation when your parents explained that to you? Did they go into any detail at all or did they just tell you when you left to go process?
Gwen
It was incredibly brief. It was just that simple exchange. They had probably asked me, “Do you want to talk about it? I don’t even think at that point they had broached the idea of therapy for anything like that, but they let me know that grandma is in jail and that she’s going to be coming home soon out on bond. But at some point, we would be going through a trial and grandma would be facing the consequences of what had happened.
Scott
I’m just trying to picture at age 10. Did you have an idea of what was about to happen? How were you feeling at that time?
Gwen
One thing I had thought about was– about a year before, my mom and I were watching the season finale of Desperate Housewives and a similar thing had come up where an elderly woman had taken the fall for a murder that was committed – spoiler alert for anybody who’s watching Desperate Housewives – I was just thinking to myself, “This only happens on TV. This only happens in movies. This doesn’t happen in real life. I know that grandpa was a mean man, and I know that grandma dealt with the brunt of it for 50 years. But how can you believe that anybody in your family, somebody who’s changed your diapers, somebody who you’ve grown up with, who you’ve known as your next-door neighbors for your entire life, how something like this could happen?”
People ask me, “Did you hear the gunshot?” I don’t know, probably. I grew up in the country. I’d hear gunshots all the time. So if I did, it was par for the course. I had absolutely no idea what was coming. So after my parents told me what had really happened, without my knowledge, they had gone to the school that I went to, they sat down with a psychologist, they had explained the situation, and they explained the upcoming situation. There was going to be a trial, there were going to be a lot of things involved, and all of my teachers got informed, “Hey, this is what’s happening to one of our students. Please just keep an eye on her. If she seems detached or if something seems like it’s wrong, here’s the context behind it and please just keep an eye on her.”
Scott
This is all new territory for them as well, I’m sure.
Gwen
Oh my God, tell me about it. I went to such a small school. Everybody knows everybody. Everybody knows everybody’s business. My family did an incredible job at preventing me from seeing it on the news too. This had made the regional news. My half-sister was going to school two and a half hours away and her professors knew about it, and they knew that this was her family that was involved. So kids at school started finding out. Mind you, I’m in fifth grade. I’m 10 years old. I said, “Nothing to do with me. I just happened to be a part of that bloodline and it happened next door to me.” But kids started finding out and they started connecting me to it.
I remember, on the day of my grandfather’s funeral, I had gone to school that day, and I got called out early. I told the class. I was like, “Oh yeah, it’s just my grandpa’s funeral today.” And one of my close friends– you have to forgive him because he’s 10. Of course, he’s going to say something like this. He said, “Oh, how did he die?” As I’m reaching for my backpack, I’m staring into the closet and I’m just frozen with fear. I’m like, “What the hell do I say?” So I waved it off. I was like, “Oh, we had a heart attack and I booked it out the door. Come to find out, shortly after, another kid in class who had lived down the road from us immediately told the entire class after I left what had happened, “Oh, her grandma shot and killed her grandpa.”
Scott
Well, at least it was after you left.
Gwen
I’ll give it that.
Scott
You mentioned there was going to be a trial, but is this because she was pleading not guilty? Do you remember what happened there?
Gwen
I’ll tell you what I do remember. Before the trial started, a few things happened as well. My mom at the time was working for her brother – my uncle. My uncle reacted differently to the rest of the family when this happened. Some words were exchanged, some accusations were made. And long story short, my mom ended up leaving that job.
Scott
What was the disagreement or what accusations?
Gwen
He was reeling from the fact that his mother took his father away from him. And I’ll let you know, like he wasn’t a good man to his kids either where there wasn’t physical abuse between my grandmother and grandfather. There was a little bit between the kids, definitely, at least to him. But regardless of that, he just had it out for my mom and her sister and my grandmother, just blaming them for this experience and the grief he was going through and the emotions that he was reeling with, and he with no proof accused my mother of having an affair with another one of the coworkers, which she was not. He was just trying to drive a wedge between her and my father and just kind of strike chaos in a time where it was already incredibly tumultuous and we really could have used the support of the whole family. But that’s one of the things we had to deal with.
Another thing that happened between that day and the trial was my grandmother got diagnosed with stage four lung cancer. This is after she came home on bond. And mind you, she is incredibly depressed. Obviously, I would be sent over to the house and say, “Why don’t you go cheer your grandma up?” Why don’t I, this little 10-year-old girl who’s trying to deal with child emotional processing of very adult topics, go see if you can cheer up your grandma who is facing terminal cancer and a prison sentence?
Scott
What a task to be assigned to you.
Gwen
I felt like the circus clown at a show where nobody was laughing, I’ll tell you that.
Scott
Tough room.
Gwen
Oh, incredibly. Two shows Sunday. That all happened. My grandmother started going through cancer treatments and, concurrently with that, the trial started. They tried to plead it down to manslaughter to a lower degree. They brought in a psychologist to speak with my grandmother about the abuse that she had endured for 50 years, and big discussion with the case was bringing in witnesses and deciding if what she did was premeditated or was a psychological snap or blip. She expressed that she does not remember any of what happened, that she felt like it was an out-of-body experience. What had gone down that day? So I am in fifth grade going into sixth grade at the time of this trial, and all I remember from my home life at this time was the phone was constantly ringing and, every time the phone was ringing, I guarantee that phone call was not going to go very well. There were going to be high emotions. They were talking to the lawyers constantly. Obviously, it was a very stressful time. That’s an understatement, but even if I’m not directly down there experiencing it, I am soaking up this stress like a sponge. This was incredibly traumatic for the entire family.
My cousins were only a couple of years older than me, so they’re also still kids going through all of this. I would be in the car with my mom and it would just be the two of us, and we’d be going somewhere. She’d be dropping me off at dance or this and that, and the phone would ring and I would cringe because I just knew that I was about to witness something incredibly stressful, incredibly traumatizing, and I could not get a break from it. It was all encompassing. I’m trying to be a little girl.
The trials and tribulations that I went through just growing up and wanting to experience the hardships of being 10 years old went by the wayside because of what was going on, and I understand. I mean, there are priorities that need to be met. There are very serious things that are going on, but I took on the role of just being okay. I decided that I am not to be worried about whatever is going on. I am intent on just taking care of myself and not letting anybody have to worry about me.
Scott
That sounds like a response from someone older than 10 years old.
Gwen
I was forced to grow up incredibly quickly. When you’re faced with such an adult situation at such a young age, you realize, “Yeah, okay. That’s my taste of the real world. This is what happens and this is how it affects people.” I learned that early on and I stopped being a kid.
Scott
That’s when your innocence was taken away from you – would you say that?
Gwen
I’d say that, yes. So we’re getting closer to the sentencing trial. My grandmother is incredibly ill. She had been out on bond. She was at home in the home that she killed her husband in. My mom is taking over as a caretaker for her, taking her to chemo treatments, changing her soiled garments. At this point, she was really losing control of her bodily autonomy. At the same time, a jury was about to sentence her. I remember distinctly one conversation my family had right before the sentencing trial was, “Do we want grandma to wear her wig to protect her dignity or should she not wear her wig so that the jury might take it easier on her?”
Scott:
What a decision to make. Did she have a preference?
Gwen
She ended up wearing– they compromised. She wore, I think, one of her homemade creations. She was an incredible knitter.
Scott
She made her own wig?
Gwen
I think she made, like, a little lace headpiece to wear. She didn’t end up wearing her wig.
Scott
Something to cover her head.
Gwen
Something to cover her head. But yeah, she did have a wig but she didn’t end up wearing it on the day of the sentencing. In my state, if you kill somebody, you are going to jail. She did end up getting charged with second-degree manslaughter, pled down from a murder charge, I believe on grounds of, for lack of a better term, insanity – that’s probably what they called it. They deemed that she did have some sort of mental lapse when this happened, and she got sentenced to 10 to 15 years in prison. She died four months into that sentence.
Scott
What a dark time – I mean, especially in her life, but for your whole family.
Gwen
Just one thing after another. It was just this tumultuous dark cloud in such a short period of time, just one punch after another. But before she had passed, the prison she got sent to was, like, five hours away. So if my parents were to go visit her, it would be a weekend trip. So I remember a lot of stays at friends’ houses on weekends when they would go and visit her. Like I said, I was trying to be really independent, really easy at this time but, towards the end, one weekend, I had gotten incredibly sick. I was highly medicated for it and I was just really feeling down. I was going to stay over at my best friend’s house. Her mom was a nurse. She’s taken such good care of me throughout this whole thing – like, just no judgment. I am so grateful for her.
But this weekend in particular, my mom’s about to walk out the door to go see her mom for what she knows is going to be the last time and I was so sick. I begged her not to go, and she didn’t. She turned right around and she said, “That’s right. I’m staying. I’ll stay for you.” Her mom passed away and I don’t believe she ever got closure for it. She expressed to me that she was grateful that it happened that way so that she didn’t have to remember her mom in her worst condition. Whether she told me that to comfort me or what, I’ll choose to believe it, but I don’t think she ever got closure for it and I still feel awful about how that all played out, but there’s nothing I could do about it. I was a kid. I had needs. That’s one of the things that I still think about and I just don’t know how to feel about it.
Scott
When was the last time you saw her?
Gwen
I don’t even remember seeing her that much when she was sick. I think, at that point, my parents were really sheltering me from some ugly things, one of which being how ill she was. Meanwhile, she’s next door too and they really put on a big production of protecting me from seeing certain things
Scott
Related to her illness, you mean?
Gwen
Correct. So at this point, it was about a year after the whole thing had happened. Spring of 2011 was probably the last time I saw her and she died in June.
Scott
Did you ever talk to her about what happened?
Gwen
No. At a certain point, it was kind of like talking to a brick wall. I can’t remember a lot of what we talked about between what had happened and the last time I saw her. It certainly was not about what she had done and really anything pertaining to the family, especially with the arguments with my uncle – probably just kept it really topical. I mean, if anything, we both loved birdwatching, a nice neutral topic to talk about.
Scott
Her story was that she didn’t remember anything about it when it happened. If she stuck with that, what would there be to talk about anyway? Right?
Gwen
Exactly. It was a mental lapse. By the next time I saw her, she was facing the reality of what had happened, and she had fallen into this horrific depression where it was kind of like talking to a brick wall. I feel like she certainly wasn’t my grandma anymore. She really had become a shell of a person, and then that only got worse after she got sick.
Scott
What do you know about what was going on with them in their marriage?
Gwen
It was a fact of the family that grandpa was a mean man – not so much to his grandkids. I was the only granddaughter. I was the baby girl. I was the creme de la creme of the family. He loved me, he loved animals, he loved gardening, but he was not a good husband. He never once referred to my grandma by her name by any sort of pet name. She was always “Woman,” and that wasn’t just in front of his kids, that was in front of his grandkids too. So that’s some of what I saw of it – a lot of disrespect, a lot of name-calling. Definitely, the primary abuse was constant verbal abuse, belittling.
There was one time I remember There was some sort of heated discussion going on. It was just grandma and grandpa in the house, and I was in the house as well. At one point, he grabbed her by the back of the neck, he looked at me and, he said, “Gwen, this is what love looks like. I love your grandmother. I just really got a hold of her and she had put on this face of playing along,” trying to not upset the granddaughter, but it was clear that my grandfather was a harsh man and his primary victim was my grandmother. He blamed her for everything.
Their garage was a smoldering pile of rubble and he was in the garage. It was winter time. He was working on his tractors and some gas fumes had hit the woodburn stove that was in there, and the garage blew up. And apparently, it was all my grandmother’s fault that she wasn’t watching him and she didn’t intervene, and it was entirely her fault that this had happened to my grandfather. It wasn’t her fault at all. This was a complete freak accident. If anything, at the hands of my own grandfather, it was his fault but she was the punching bag for all of this. Any mistake he made, she should have been watching him. It was always on her to sink your claws into – a woman who at one point had spirit, had the spark of life.
To grind her down, and not only her, but my uncle as well– I could definitely see the effect of it on my mother and my aunt – what kind of iron fist he was raising as they were growing up and how it affected them – and how that in turn affected how I was raised as well. Not to say that my parents were harsh with me at all. That’s not what I’m saying. Like for instance, my mom will not teach me how to drive stick shift because, when her dad taught her how to drive stick shift, he traumatized her so much and just screamed at her and this and that.
There were multiple other times that my dad can recall just from living next to them and experiencing their marriage up close. Come to find out later in life, probably 10 years after the fact, that it was daily sexual abuse too. If he wanted it, he got it. That was her duty as a wife. That was something she didn’t question. That was just something she did. But it went on for 50 years, and it wears on a person, and it’s abuse – the foundation that the marriage was built on. It was no wonder that – even as a little kid, I was suspecting that – something worse than natural causes had occurred when he died.
Scott
Do you feel that she was at all justified in doing this?
Gwen
It’s taken a long time, but I’ve come to forgive everybody involved because they did what they had to do to survive. It’s not the decision that everybody would make, but it’s a fact that happened. She didn’t mean to cause this kind of trauma to our family. She didn’t know what the repercussions of this was going to be, but she could not exist like that for a moment longer. It happens to people. It happens to spouses, partners who are abused. It goes in both directions and it rarely ends well.
She had been propositioned by members of my family who had seen the signs. If she wanted to get out of the marriage, they were offering money, they were offering her safe places to go, and she was terrified of leaving. She was afraid that he was going to hunt her down. She stayed for the sake of her marriage, for the sake of her family. Again, I can’t say that would be the decision that I would make or anybody else would make, but it’s a fact of what happened. She was doing what she had to do to survive and my uncle reacted the way he did because that’s what he had to do to survive. When I tell the people or peers the story, one of my favorite reactions that I got was, no hesitation, “Your grandma’s OG.” And I believe it. Yeah, I agree. You go through that for 50 years and at some point you can’t take it anymore and you shoot your husband in the back of the head. That’s what you do. That’s what you do to survive. I can’t say there’s a right or wrong in this situation, but I have forgiven everybody for what happened.
Scott
What happened to their house?
Gwen
My parents still live next door to that house. There was quite a hairy estate battle where my uncle got involved and my mom would come up to my room and say, “Oh, your uncle just became the executor,” and was kind of hoping I would share in the frustration and the anger of these adult topics, and I tried my best.
Scott
And you were, at this point, a preteen?
Gwen
12, yeah. So now I’ve gone from dealing with the fallout of a family member committing a felony to this, a state battle and legal issues and this and that and the other thing – things that kids wouldn’t necessarily know about otherwise, but I was thrown into the middle of it. I was a witness to every single moment of this. Eventually, all the possessions got sold off and distributed. There were probably, like, 50 to 60 guns in the house because they were collectors. They had the gun and tackle shop back in the day. Those were all taken as evidence. Eventually, some of them got redistributed to the family as they were proven to not be evidence. Some nice folks ended up buying the house a few years ago. My parents disclosed to them what happened in the house,
Scott
Not good for the resale value.
Gwen
Yeah, good for the price in a buyer’s market, I suppose, but in this economy, you got to do what you got to do to get a house. The house has new owners and they’ve painted it a different color. But you still look over there and think that it used to be where grandma and grandpa lived and then think, “Oh, I saw that house on the news.” And you just start to remember everything. You try to remember the good parts of growing up, picking strawberries with grandpa and stuff like that, but it does have this dark cloud of hindsight hanging over it.
Scott
You had kind of a dark cloud over you when it happened. I understand that you were bullied because of this.
Gwen
Yeah. I mean, to be a child and to just be involved in the situation. What was particularly the worst was that some of my friends’ parents– it seemed to have this very adverse reaction to me where I think they were afraid of the trauma I had gone through, that maybe I would fall down a certain path that I might influence my friends on. I know my own parents were terrified that I was going to fall into a bad crowd to start abusing drugs. I definitely aimed to stay on the straight and narrow but, at the same time too, I had this reputation that preceded me everywhere I went. Yeah. I had children who, the same age as me, don’t know a thing about family dynamics and things like that. They can’t fully flesh opinions on such adult topics either. Telling me, my grandma’s crazy, my parents are crazy, you’re crazy, things of that nature, just because everybody knew about it and it was such a unique situation that I’m sure a lot of their opinions obviously were influenced by their parents and what they were hearing, but they didn’t realize that their parents’ opinions were going to directly affect the family member that this has happened to.
Scott
I can kind of see kids having weird opinions like that because they just hear this story and they know you’re involved and it kind of makes you a little bit different from everybody else but, for the parents of those children to have that opinion about ostracizing you, that just seems so wrong.
Gwen
It was, yeah, I think it was just unchartered territory for everybody. It’s a farm town. It’s a small community. To experience something like this was really, like, a once in a lifetime thing, especially to know the family– my mom and dad were incredibly involved in the community, were incredibly involved in my extracurricular activities and the school, so everybody knew our faces. Then, news articles started showing up online of my parents escorting my grandmother out of the courthouse, and it just kind of muddied the waters of, “Oh, we have these community members who are going through this who have an incarcerated family member, now an incarcerated mother and grandmother.”
Scott
Did these reactions continue even as you got older? What did you experience as you went into your teen years?
Gwen
It wasn’t so much an adverse reaction as I got older. But as I said, it was a small town and it was big news. All of the middle school staff knew and then it followed me as I went to high school too. When I was a senior in high school, I was a part of this accelerated pre-med program, so I was doing rotations in the hospital. In one department, I was getting to know some of the staff there, telling them about my life, about my personal life, telling them who my mom was, who my dad was. People in the community were making small talk.
At the end of my internship there, one of the staff members pulled me aside and he put his hand on my shoulder and he said to me, “I know what your family went through and I just wanted to let you know that I don’t blame your grandmother for anything, and that I am totally supportive of you guys and what you went through.” As much as I appreciated the sentiment, I started to realize that I could try to be an individual and form my own personage. But at the same time too, there was this stain on my name and this stain on my family – and this thing that followed people – and it affected friends and friends of friends, and everybody knew about it, and everybody had an opinion about it. I’m sure he was trying to comfort me when he told me that, but all it did was disconcert me. I wanted to separate myself from that. It had nothing to do with me.
Then, later on – this was pretty recent actually – I was having coffee with my high school psychologist. I hadn’t taken any of his classes, but we just got to liking each other and I was talking about going away for school and he said to me, “Yeah, I can understand after everything you’ve been through. You just want to get as far away as possible.” And I thought to myself, “Shit man. I never once talked about this situation with him, but yet everybody knew and everybody attached it to me before they even met me.”
For my time in my hometown, it was a part of my identity whether I wanted it to be or not, and it’s kind of the elephant in the room in my family. I mean, we’ll talk about characteristics of good old, grumpy, racist grandpa or birdwatching with grandma or something like that, but we don’t talk about that period of time because just the shockwave of trauma that it put on every single person in the family because we were all right there. We were so tight-knit.
Scott
You had mentioned the one time when your grandpa had held your grandma by her neck, and the phrase he used is, “This is what love looks like.” You recently got married. Did that skew your view of love as you became an adult?
Gwen
When you experience such a big deal and such stress and such an absence of love, it really clears up what love does look like, and I give so much credit to my parents for going through what they went through, and it only strengthened them. They are truly the pinnacle of love and teamwork in a marriage, and I am so fortunate to have that as my foundation to build my identity as a romantic partner, and I found that in my own marriage too. I mean, I told him about everything that happened on our second date because it’s something that informs my personality, my independence, my nonchalance, most certainly.
Scott
Can you elaborate on that? Nonchalance – how is that part of your personality?
Gwen
When you go through something that’s such a big deal, not a lot seems like a big deal anymore when you make it through an experience like that, such a hardship like that. You see how everybody else also survived, they all made it through. We all came out as okay as we could. Have you gained some resilience? I definitely did that as a child. I had to put on that crunchy exterior and I’ve still got that soft violet underbelly on the inside, but not so much as a big deal to me anymore.
Scott
Have you gotten therapy for this?
Gwen
I did. It took a long time. When the whole thing originally happened, the word therapy got mentioned once or twice but, 15 years ago, this was back in an age when therapy was just a word that was kind of whispered.
Scott
Stigma.
Gwen
Yes, most certainly. And we were a tough-as-nails family. We didn’t need therapy. We just needed to hold each other up, which turns out is a really difficult thing to do when you’re 10 years old and you haven’t obtained the tools to handle such emotions and such experiences. So at the time, I did not receive any sort of counseling for this. I believe I talked to the middle school counselor once and then just decided to take it on by myself. Then, as I became an adult, I realized this is a really big burden for one person to take on. So, I did seek help and I had a really eye-opening time in therapy talking about such subjects as what love looks like, what love doesn’t look like, being responsible for the emotional wellbeing of other people who, first of all, I was not equipped as a child to emotionally regulate them and this was an experience where they needed a professional. So that was a lot of what I reconciled with in therapy and learning to relinquish some of my emotional independence and start to find support through my loved ones, my family, and friends again. It’s really liberating to not take it on all by myself anymore.
Scott
Do you talk to your uncle?
Gwen
No, I don’t. My mother doesn’t. My aunt doesn’t. He still lives in town. Some of the family has run into him. In fact, I even ran into him a couple years ago while I was at work. I didn’t recognize him, but something about this man’s appearance– like, I was having a reaction to it. We just had a simple clerk customer interaction and, as soon as he walked out the door, I realized, “Holy shit, that’s my uncle.” I was having such a strong reaction because he looked just like my grandpa. I hadn’t seen him in 10 years and he had aged so much and he really captures the likeness of my grandpa and it– I don’t say it brought back a lot of memories for me, but it was like seeing my grandpa again. It was a really interesting experience.
Scott
Did he recognize you?
Gwen
Yes, he did recognize me. Well, I had a name tag on, but he hadn’t seen me since I was 10 years old. He hadn’t seen me since my grandmother’s service. My parents had just kept me from seeing him for that time, and understandably too, he had really put a toll on my family and accused them of some awful things. But now I have broached the idea of wanting to stop in and say hi to him again. But at this point, I’ve just progressed far enough in my life without him that there’s no missing spot in my heart for him anymore.
Scott
So with that interaction, he didn’t. Identify himself to you. He was just a customer and left.
Gwen
That’s right, yeah. It was Christmas and I had some fun makeup on and he said, “Oh, I like your makeup, kid.” Just like a little term of endearment and absolutely no reaction. I did not recognize him at all. So, whether he thinks that I did recognize him and just put on, like, some stone-cold face or whatever, I don’t think he would be opposed to seeing me again, but I’m a different person now.
Scott
Is there any part of this that we haven’t talked about that you wanted to mention?
Gwen
I’ve talked a lot about the community’s adverse reactions to what had happened. Obviously, I mean, violence occurred, a felony was committed, but at the same time too, people recognize the bigger picture of the history of the family and the pressure my grandmother had been under for 50 years, and I’m sure some people in the community have experienced that themselves. A lot of people showed up in truly the best way. We got flowers, so much support. My bus driver sent the family a huge bouquet of flowers after my grandfather passed and he knew what had happened.
When my grandmother was going through a treatment, she had medical bills we had fundraisers for. We had scoop dinners at the local church and people showed up and they hugged her and they respected her as a member of the community and a woman who was going through an absolute shit storm. It was incredibly heartening to see the way friends of friends and complete strangers uplifted the family and, most importantly, the children. The things that they protected us from, and just the warm hearts and a lot of people showing a complete lack of judgment was truly astonishing. When I think about the whole situation, I often forget to remember all of the community support that we got. It was a small-knit community. They were members of the community and there were plenty of people who wanted her head on a stick, and I didn’t hear from any of them. I heard from the people who were showing up to support a family in their hardship – teaches you a thing or two about unconditional love. It’s out there.
Scott
It’s a pretty wild story. Most people don’t have a story like this in their family. I appreciate you telling it.
Gwen
Thanks for letting me tell it.
Scott
Of course this whole story is a sad one. But another thing that Gwen mentioned to me after we finished our conversation is that the shooting happened just the day before Gwen’s mom’s birthday. So they’ll never forget that date.
You can see pictures of Gwen and her grandparents in the episode notes at WhatWasThatLike.com/213. And if you were wondering something about this story that I didn’t ask her about, Gwen is in the What Was That Like podcast Facebook group. Come on over and join us there for lots of great discussions – WhatWasThatLike.com/facebook.
Lillian
Hey Scott, this is Lillian. I’ve sent in the story previously about doing CPR on my coworker and I’m just currently at work listening to the episode about Kevin giving CPR, and I just wanted to call and say it is incredibly interesting to get to hear the stories of other people doing CPR and how that went for them. Thanks again for the opportunity. Have a great day.
Scott
And I wanted to tell you about a recent experience I had. Have you ever heard of Andy Grammer? I actually had not heard of him until recently. He’s a really popular singer/songwriter. I just had not heard of him or his music. But he was performing here in Clearwater, and he’s a dog lover. So his team had the local Humane Society – the one I volunteer for – bring over a few dogs to the concert venue for him.
So, a couple of hours before the show, we get there with 3 dogs and Andy comes out and he is clearly a lover of dogs because he immediately just got down on the floor and started rolling around with them and playing with them. Super friendly guy. We got pictures with him, which you can see in the Facebook group, and he also did a little promo video for the local Humane Society, telling people to come and adopt one of these dogs. It was a fun experience. And now I’m an Andy Grammer fan so I guess I need to check out his music.
Graphics for this episode were created by Bob Bretz. Full episode transcription was created by James Lai.
And it’s time for the Listener Story, which, of course, is how we end every episode. I’d love for you to send in YOUR story. Just something interesting that happened to you, that you can tell in about 5-10 minutes. Record it on your phone and email it to me at Scott@WhatWasThatLike.com.
This listener talks about dealing with death, at a young age.
Stay safe, and I’ll see you next time.
(Listener Story)
I grew up in a small country town in California outside of the Bay Area called Rio Vista. Rio Vista is the kind of town where everyone knows everybody in the town. Lineage runs strong. I went to a high school where seeing goats, lambs, cows, and pigs was the norm. My high school had no more than 400 students. Even though some of us didn’t talk to each other, we were all close-knit. I never saw anyone I didn’t know.
I was a cheerleader at the school. In every football season, one of the students from my high school would walk around the quad with a box of pomegranates. I never really spoke to him but, of course, I knew of him because he was in the same grade as my sister and because of our school being so small, I was in the same class as his younger brother.
Since the third grade, actually, this day was like any other. I got up at 6.30 AM to get ready for school. Left at 7.45 as my school was only 10 minutes away. School started at 8.10, but I like to get there a little bit early to talk to my friends. My first period class was PE and the gym that was held for PE was right by the AG building. Right behind the EC building was an empty field. A lot of kids would cross through this field in order to get onto the high school campus.
I arrived at the gym with my older sister who happened to be in the same class, and our attention was grabbed by the bright red and white lights coming from the EC building. We decided to move a little closer so we could see what was going on, but we weren’t able to see much in the first period. Bell had rung, so we had to go about our day. I don’t necessarily remember what period it was but, eventually, the announcement was made to our school that one of the students had passed away. Turns out it was the kid who had always passed out the pomegranates during lunchtime. My school held a memorial for him and it was a really dark time for my school while we mourned him. He was a very smart, kind, and giving young man, and he was missed dearly.