When your life is a lie

and the lie has shaped your life.

(This post has been in Draft Mode for a while.  The details are going to be kept fuzzy because this is an ongoing investigation.  I thought it was timely to post it as we discuss recent lies and their affects here in the Rain.)

It was the mid-1990s.  They had four children and their marriage was in shambles.  As a last-ditch effort, they went to Europe on a family vacation.  It was too little, too late.  When they returned, Dad's recreational drug use and indiscriminate spending had gotten out of control.

Their older son was mid-teens, their two girls pre-teens, and their youngest was a five year old boy.  After a contentious meal one evening, Dad and older son had an argument in the garage.  Dad turned and walked down the alley, never to return.

A Missing Person Report was filed, but the police were not anxious to track down a wayward spouse who didn't want to be found.  When the first birthday after he left came around, they expected him to show up because he loved to make the kid's birthdays special.  He did not show up then, nor at Christmas, nor for any other holiday.

A while later, he put his wedding ring and wallet in the family mailbox.  They knew then that he would never come back.  It was speculated that he had left with another woman.  Private investigators could not find him.  It was time to get on with their lives. 

Mom eventually filed for his life insurance and got a job.  She got a divorce.  After a while, she had him declared dead.  Mom and the children, each in their own way, blamed themselves individually for Dad leaving. 

One son got heavily into drugs.  One son was suicidal and has been in counseling for years.  The girls eventually grew into lovely young women with families of their own.  But all of them grew with a sense of guilt and abandonment.  They each lived with their own brand of shame.

Sometime last year as they readied a subdivision for construction, the backhoe operator stopped the proceedings when he saw something suspicious while digging.  When it was ascertained that it was human remains in the drainage ditch, it was ironic that the backhoe operator had been a friend of the Dad.

It was the wife of the operator who told Mom that bones had been found near her property.  DNA testing confirmed that it was the Dad, and that he had probably died the night he disappeared almost seventeen years earlier. 

The motivation of the person who put the wedding ring and wallet in the mailbox is a total mystery.  But because of the life circumstances of my friend, they believed it was his final parting act from their family. 

Did he die of natural causes? Drugs? Exposure to the elements? Murder? No one knows yet.  While finding his remains brings some closure to the family, there is something that has haunted me for the past year since his discovery.

Everything that they believed, the Mom's feeling of rejection, everything that shaped the children's formative years, the truths which formed their adult beings . . . it was all a lie.  Can you unlearn those truths that formed your person?  Can you heal the wounds that were caused by what you knew to be fact, but which were, in fact, a lie? 

I don't have the answers to those questions, but I do know this.  The older I get, the more intolerant I get of lies.  The more I value truth with all of its repercussions and sometime ugliness.  It is hard to see yet if there is freedom at the end of this discovery.

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