CharPrincessa

He was a son.

He was a brother.

He was a father.

He was an uncle.

He was a friend.

He was a veteran.

He was an abusive, manipulative, and exploitive husband thrice.

When he was found his home was filthy with moldy food, animal feces, candy wrappers, pill bottles and straight up trash. His home reflected the depth of his mental illness. Chaos, entropy, and death ran rampant throughout the home. The time of his death and being found was not long enough to accumulate the wall to wall piles of feces in every room. The stench of decomp punched the uninitiated in the face. My adult son, Jack, was forewarned and arrived with Vicks in his pocket. He set to task opening windows, taking out the trash, picking up animal waste, and clearing a path to the fabled treasure chests. Like Bluebeard’s basement, the treasure chests were off limits to each of his wives. In the mid 90’s the treasure chests held family documents, valuable sports cards and 1st edition comic books. Over the years the content changed, as Jack began working in his father’s secret treasure closet. He uncovered images of me from before his birth and throughout his early childhood. My very early Naval career was well represented too with documents, awards, and photos. There were paparazzi like pictures and private investigator reports chronicling my courtship with my current husband*. While on the outskirts of my budding joy John documented the life I was crafting in detail, it is still unsettling.

I knew something was wrong with him after our son was born and was told it was my hormones.

I knew he was watching and no one believed me.

I told them he was dangerous and it took demolishing 2 other women‘s lives before his family started to question his behavior.

I did keep my son from his father, and only my son can forgive my selfishness.

If I knew 25 years ago my child would have to clean up after his father’s death, I wouldn’t have wished so hard that he would die alone, accompanied by a hungry dog or cat, not found for a couple days, in a hot fetid house, filled with flies, and his mother weeping because it’s closed casket.

There’s power in the curse of an anguished half-Filipino woman descended from the Wizard of Yester. Additionally my mother is close friends with the Virgin Mary, St. Francis of Assisi, and St. Gerard Majella. They talk every day, she often prays for my soul and the souls of our family. We thank The Universe for unanswered prayers. I don’t know how long John was living in squalor. I do know if John passed years earlier, Jack wouldn’t have the maturity, experience, and compassion for his father as he does now.

Though I feel sadness for my son, his cousins, and his father’s family, I’m also relieved and ecstatic. I’ve fallen asleep naturally, no nightmares, and I woke up with the sun. During the last 25 years I was hyperalert, anxious, paranoid, self editing when I was around people I didn’t know, and careful I didn’t share any details. I was on guard to his machinations 24/7 for 25 years. Until he died I didn’t realize how “What if John shows up?” curtailed my life. How he stole joy from me because “What if John showed up?”, “What if one of his friends shows up?” As I built a life I loved surrounded by family and friends, therapy was my constant companion. My weekly chats with the “The Wizard” Dr Harrellson at Camp Geiger began in 1998 after he pushed me down a flight of stairs. She helped me to see that my situation was deteriorating and it was not “hormones”. Dr H set my expectations of mental health treatment. She gave me the first of many offers to leave the service and get away. After a broken nose, burns from the iron, military protective order, and the ineffective Family Advocacy Program (FAP) interventions, I was ready to give up. Later the FAP board would decree I was the abuser and was ordered to attend 6 weeks of female offender group classes with a serving of anger management to clear the order and my record. By the third week my facilitator sent me back to my command… and yet I wouldn’t escape for another 7 months.

There were many dark days. Thoughts about quitting life weren’t rare. At one point I thought he would stop terrorizing or threatening my family if I died. Dark right? Then I would think, he’ll get Jack, if I died, and it wasn’t fair to our son to leave him to John’s devices. This was everyday for 16 years. When Jack turned 18, I thought it was over. It wasn’t.

Fast forward

One year into the pandemic, I felt nestled and ready. Surviving and existing was not enough. I wanted more for my life and family, but to abandon the shadows I needed help, and I got it.

Why not tackle my fears, doubts, and sadness now (April 2021)?

Where was I going?

We were in a pandemic!

My Veteran Affairs Mental Health team has two amazing Women professionals (one is a veteran too!). They helped to debride my invisible wounds and heal. Like dry dressing changes, it hurt.

Virtually attending therapy weekly with a psychologist and a Wounded Warrior Project Odyssey Women’s Dungeons and Dragons group twice a week reinforced my decision to live my life in color and open up to meeting new people. It was my cobbled attempt to develop a personalized Intensive Outpatient Program. Reconnecting with myself was only possible with the support and encouragement from the women veteran community. They’ve been there, done that, and got the t-shirt. Rewriting my trauma account, reading it out loud, and attacking my stuck points was mentally and physically exhausting. Ugly sobbing crying, broken pencil tips, and many tears made up those pages of his worst attack. Though facing therapy with real candor, faked optimism, and genuine hope, I started to shrug off the invisible armor, spackling, and hundreds of tiny bandaids. Eventually my ability to find happiness in tiny doses snowballed into a truly beautiful life. I went from near shut-in, to frequent flier (yes, to and from the US mainland) Dungeons and Dragons enthusiast, and a Community Service event organizer in a year. I still have more to do.

Everything prepared me for this time. A day when my son would ask me “Mama, what do you do when the boogeyman is dead?”

“Anything you want.”

John Brandi was 47.

The cause of death is under investigation.

*Michael and I were married at the now closed Newport, RI Aidan's Irish pub on March 5, 2003.

**We began divorce proceedings on my birthday May 26, 1998 and finalized July 1999.

I’m an advocate for Women and Children affected by Domestic and Sexual Violence. I support the Joyful Heart Foundation, Wounded Warrior Project, and Girl-Up.

"You will understand me when I say that my Middle High German was my life. It was all I cared about. I was a scholar, a specialist. Then, suddenly, I was plunged into all the new activity, as the university was drawn into the new situation; meetings, conferences, interviews, ceremonies, and, above all, papers to be filled out, reports, bibliographies, lists, questionnaires. And on top of that were the demands in the community, the things in which one had to, was ‘expected to’ participate that had not been there or had not done been important before. It was all rigmarole, of course, but it consumed all one’s energies, coming on top of the work one really wanted to do. You can see how easy it was, then, not to think about fundamental things. One had no time."

"Those," I said, "are the words of my friend the baker. ‘One had no time to think. There was so much going on.’"

"Your friend the baker was right," said my colleague. "The dictatorship, and the whole process of its coming into being, was above all diverting. It provided an excuse not to think for people who did not want to think anyway. I do not speak of your ‘little men,’ your baker and so on; I speak of my colleagues and myself, learned men, mind you. Most of us did not want to think about fundamental things and never had. There was no need to. Nazism gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about—we were decent people—and kept us so busy with continuous changes and ‘crises’ and so fascinated, yes, fascinated, by the machinations of the ‘national enemies,’ without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us. Unconsciously, I suppose, we were grateful. Who wants to think?

"To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it—please try to believe me—unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted,’ that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these ‘little measures’ that no ‘patriotic German’ could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.

"How is this to be avoided, among ordinary men, even highly educated ordinary men? Frankly, I do not know. I do not see, even now. Many, many times since it all happened I have pondered that pair of great maxims, Principiis obsta and Finem respice—‘Resist the beginnings’ and ‘Consider the end.’ But one must foresee the end in order to resist, or even see, the beginnings. One must foresee the end clearly and certainly and how is this to be done, by ordinary men or even by extraordinary men? Things might have. And everyone counts on that might.

"Your ‘little men,’ your Nazi friends, were not against National Socialism in principle. Men like me, who were, are the greater offenders, not because we knew better (that would be too much to say) but because we sensed better. Pastor Niemöller spoke for the thousands and thousands of men like me when he spoke (too modestly of himself) and said that, when the Nazis attacked the Communists, he was a little uneasy, but, after all, he was not a Communist, and so he did nothing; and then they attacked the Socialists, and he was a little uneasier, but, still, he was not a Socialist, and he did nothing; and then the schools, the press, the Jews, and so on, and he was always uneasier, but still he did nothing. And then they attacked the Church, and he was a Churchman, and he did something—but then it was too late."

"Yes," I said.

"You see," my colleague went on, "one doesn’t see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even talk, alone; you don’t want to ‘go out of your way to make trouble.’ Why not?—Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.

"Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, in the general community, ‘everyone’ is happy. One hears no protest, and certainly sees none. You know, in France or Italy there would be slogans against the government painted on walls and fences; in Germany, outside the great cities, perhaps, there is not even this. In the university community, in your own community, you speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, ‘It’s not so bad’ or ‘You’re seeing things’ or ‘You’re an alarmist.’

"And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can’t prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don’t know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally, people who have always thought as you have.

"But your friends are fewer now. Some have drifted off somewhere or submerged themselves in their work. You no longer see as many as you did at meetings or gatherings. Informal groups become smaller; attendance drops off in little organizations, and the organizations themselves wither. Now, in small gatherings of your oldest friends, you feel that you are talking to yourselves, that you are isolated from the reality of things. This weakens your confidence still further and serves as a further deterrent to—to what? It is clearer all the time that, if you are going to do anything, you must make an occasion to do it, and then you are obviously a troublemaker. So you wait, and you wait.

"But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.

"And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jewish swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.

"You have gone almost all the way yourself. Life is a continuing process, a flow, not a succession of acts and events at all. It has flowed to a new level, carrying you with it, without any effort on your part. On this new level you live, you have been living more comfortably every day, with new morals, new principles. You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, things that your father, even in Germany, could not have imagined.

"Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven’t done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we do nothing). You remember those early meetings of your department in the university when, if one had stood, others would have stood, perhaps, but no one stood. A small matter, a matter of hiring this man or that, and you hired this one rather than that. You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair.

"What then? You must then shoot yourself. A few did. Or ‘adjust’ your principles. Many tried, and some, I suppose, succeeded; not I, however. Or learn to live the rest of your life with your shame. This last is the nearest there is, under the circumstances, to heroism: shame. Many Germans became this poor kind of hero, many more, I think, than the world knows or cares to know."

Do you remember where you were any of the years after?

It was my honor to reenlist on September 11, 2003 in Newport, RI. I was working ASF at the time. In two days it would be my ten year anniversary of being in the Navy, as I had left for Recruit Training on September 13, 1993. My reenlisting Officer was the adorable (oh my gosh she is still so cute!) Lorie Conza. She didn't own any cammies and had to borrow her husband's.

I'm not a rare creature. I think it's common for people who reenlist to occasionally shed a tear or two. This day was no exception. The significance of the day wasn't lost on us. We both had attended a remembrance ceremony that same day and security was up at the Naval Station. It was a point of pride to renew commitment to defend my country on the anniversary of the day we were struck in our heart. The events of the day may have snowballed me. As I raised my hand, so did a few tears fall and said my oath of enlistment,

I remember being angry for the pain the families went through.

I remember my fear that day when I drove my car up on a sidewalk to pick up my child to hold him. (I thought it was last days.)

I remembered trying to keep my friend calm on the phone as she drove 90mph on the GW pkw in D.C.

I remember being stunned learning in the weeks to come about how many people I personally knew who's friends and families were directly impacted by those events.

When you look at this picture it may seem incongruous with the solemnity of the day, but when LCDR Conza took this picture Michael had whispered something incredibly inappropriate to me. You see, even back then he couldn't stand to see me cry.