I look a lot like my father.

I’ve got dark brown hair and dark brown eyes, and that one droopy eyelid that he has, too. It’s a very Jewish look, a standard throughout history.

Out of the eight of us, there are only three with brown hair and brown eyes. My older sister Jessica, me, and Margaret. The rest are fair, with light eyes varying from blue to green to hazel. That’s from our mother’s side. She’s part Irish and English. There’s a bit of German thrown in there as well.

One brother’s eyes change depending on what color clothing he is wearing. One sister was born shockingly blonde. He never believed that she was his, not with her green eyes and her blonde hair.

The rest of that story is Grace’s to tell. But what’s ours to tell, what’s mine to tell, is that I won’t name him. And I won’t show his picture.

I’m calling him Schlep in this series.

First, because it sounds funny. Second, because my last conversation with him was in 2010 before I cut him out of my life. We talked again briefly in 2015, when I was married and brought my youngest sister to live with me in Colorado. He was her legal guardian at the time and I had to talk to him then, but we haven’t talked since. Third, because he refuses to admit that he’s ever done anything wrong. Fourth, because people who don’t know him or what he’s done continue to defend him, and I’m tired of it. Fifth, because there’s nothing quite like the justice of erasing an evil person’s name from history.

I’ll keep the last name, because I’m a writer and that name is bigger than him and what he’s done.

There was a part of me that expected him to change when Margaret died.

As I grieved her death, I expected that he would perhaps finally admit his wrongdoing. We opened the door for it. When he made senseless demands, we navigated them respectfully but firmly. He was still her father. He could have half of her ashes.

But his live-in girlfriend was not welcome at the service.

Absolutely not.

Part of that story involves my youngest sister, and that is her story to tell, if she so chooses. When my parents separated and then divorced, I was away at college, but most of my siblings were still living at home. I wouldn’t know until years later what they all went through after the divorce, because nothing seemed as bad as what the oldest went through as children, but I did know at the time that my mother took the three youngest, while the three in the middle remained in the house, supposedly with our father. He soon found a wealthy girlfriend and moved in with her, abandoning the teenagers.

And then he found an opportunity to take the three youngest away from my mother, forcing her to pay child support for years. And the woman he lived with would shove my siblings down stairs or walk in on them in the bathroom. She seemed to be made from the same material he’d been built from.

Schlep had his lawyer call us, asking for the executor of Margaret’s estate. Margaret had been 20 when she died. She didn’t have an estate.

But she did have a car.

It was a BMW, her dream car.

Schlep would ultimately have no claim to it, but it didn’t stop him from trying.

And he called the group of people in New York City, the cult where he and my mother met, and gave them a lot of details about Margaret’s death. Things we didn’t want anyone to know, at least not yet, while we processed what had happened.

Then that group of people shared those details on a Facebook Live video.

When there’s grief, when there’s death that happens to someone so young, people say and do stupid things. It happened to me when a friend’s brother passed away, years ago. I think I said something like, “You’ll get over it.” And I didn’t mean it the same way it came out. I was sitting with her in her grief and I was uncomfortable and I didn’t know what to do.

And when Margaret died, people said stupid things to me, similar things to what I’d said to my friend. I was able to sort through the well meaning and the intentionally hurtful.

This was a situation that was intentionally hurtful. This group of people had not been a part of my family’s lives for years. The leader’s authority and insistence while misusing the Bible, had enabled my father to do awful things to us for years. I’d last spoken to this group of people in 2010, when I moved to Colorado, when I was finally starting to understand the extent of what they’d done.

Margaret’s death was (and still is) an open investigation.

It was not thoughtless to broadcast those details.

It was cruel.

Emblem of our House seeks to share the story of Margaret’s life and death. Margaret Rose Silverstein died on April 5, 2018. She was 20 years old.