I’d wanted my parents to divorce since I was nine, a year before Margaret was born.

My father’s favorite words included: “disrespectful,” “unacceptable,” and “contentious.”

Faith was rolled up into the dialogue, as his words, especially “contentious” were framed biblically. The man is in charge, the head of the household. Any dissension was challenging that god-given authority. He was the husband. The father.

I know now that this was spiritual abuse. Brainwashing. There’s nowhere to go when someone holds absolute authority, is there? A dictator in the home. The bible supporting him doing whatever he wants. “I am god in this house,” he said once, driving his agenda home. Using force to claim the power and control when necessary. Which was often.

It took another ten years for my mother to leave him, and by that time, I was 3,000 miles away, going to college in northern California.

I stayed at the private, Christian school over the summer, working on campus. From August 2005 to July 2007, I remained there, going through more trauma and shock of adapting to a world very different from the one I’d grown up in, one full of privileged young adults, who got allowances of $400 every month, plus more if they ran out. I struggled to pay back a roommate $5, and when she asked me if I couldn’t just ask my parents for it, I had to laugh, one of those laughs that doesn’t have mirth, just the weight of a reality she couldn’t understand.

A reality that included fighting the grief of leaving my siblings behind. Feeling like I’d abandoned them. Before I left, I took each of my three youngest siblings out for a meal. Individually, just me and one at a time. They were 10, 8, and 5 years old. Those ages seemed to imprint themselves on my mind, like if I left, they’d stay that age forever. That maybe life would suspend in time.

It didn’t, and it would take me years to process that. Trauma I didn’t know how to share or explain.

I was at school on the quad, near the bell tower, when my mother called to tell me she was leaving my father. “Good,” I said.

She found someone else quickly.

So did he.

Preparing for Margaret’s funeral felt like one giant chore that made my brain and body ache. I wanted to sit on something comfy, maybe a giant mound of dryer-warm comforters, and numb it all. I was so tired.

We got the flowers first, some roses. A little color for the house. Her middle name was Rose, and it seemed fitting to hold on tight to the physical representation. I wanted roses on my arm as a tattoo, in my hair for my conditioner, in the scents I used to clean my home. I wanted to have something of her always touching me, reminding me to never forget.

Then we went to the funeral home, grabbing coffee on the way. We weren’t allowed to bring it inside, so we stashed it around the outside of the building because the cars were too far away and we were already running late.

We sat in a circle with the funeral director. She was very young and beautiful and I wanted to know why she picked this career. It was this part, she said. Helping families say good-bye.

We could bury Margaret with a closed casket or we could cremate her. It felt like a cruel choice. She’d been shot in the face, either a suicide or a homicide, and that meant her face, her beautiful face, had been mostly blown away. The body was in the back and we could see her if we wanted, but the funeral director didn’t recommend it.

My mom needed to make sure it was her, though, so they agreed the funeral director would take a photo of the tattoo on Margaret’s arm. It was the only way to have some physical closure.

I’m glad my memories didn’t morph into what she looked like after the shooting. I had two dreams after she died, and her face was intact. She had her baby on her hip, as she’d been pregnant when she died. She didn’t know she was dead.

Schlep wasn’t paying for anything, so we crowdfunded the cheapest option for Margaret: cremation. That way, we could get the parts of her we couldn’t physically say good-bye to, safely enclosed in necklaces and heart-shaped urns. I needed that, I realized. I needed something concrete.

But everything was also so expensive, and I was angry at the industry. Was it taking advantage or was it helping? It all felt, not cold, but hard, unyielding. A sharp stop. The cliff right before a drop-off.

I wanted to save money, so I decided to pass on getting a necklace. I’d just get an urn. But then as it hit me that I couldn’t carry her with me, I had an emotional moment. Was it too late to change my mind? I needed the necklace, I NEEDED IT, and my siblings understood that I wasn’t angry at them. It was misplaced, just the grief bubbling up.

Then there was the funeral itself. We could hold it at the funeral home. That’s what it was for, anyway. But there was no way to keep certain people out, and to minimize additional trauma, we needed to.

I came back to Pennsylvania in 2007, with an internship at the local newspaper. I’d wanted to be a writer since I was young, and I wanted to be a journalist after joining my college’s newspaper. I’d met a ragtag bunch of misfits there, fitting in perfectly, and it was my safe place on campus. I’m still friends with a few to this day, and they’ll never get rid of me. We bonded over late nights editing and watching Ol’ Greg videos. My internship at the Pocono Record was a dream come true, and I learned an incredible amount during my time there. But I’d come back to everything in an uproar. I didn’t like my mother’s new boyfriend, and we got into several fights. I ended up moving in with a friend of hers. I was tired of authoritative figures, and I was too old by then. He did not attempt to build a relationship with me, just lay down the rules. And because his own two children were young, around 11 or 12, he treated me the same way. And I wasn’t having it.

I don’t know when the shift started happening for me. I didn’t have a moment of breaking free of the oppression. In fact, it would take another few years, as I didn’t stop trying to have a relationship with my father until 2010. There are things to this day that I’m working on. But if I had to try with my father, since he was my father, since we were blood, I felt a sense of responsibility, I’d be damned if I owed that to someone who wasn’t related to me. 

Schlep’s new girlfriend was the same as my mother’s boyfriend. Schlep had moved in with her fairly quickly, and he never tried to introduce her or encourage relationships between us kids and her. She was just suddenly THERE in a similar way to the boyfriend, making demands and expecting certain benefits. I learned her parents had died mysteriously, their brakes failing in the rain. She’d inherited a lot of money and somehow cut her brother out of her life. I didn’t know if it was true, but it was intriguing. I didn’t like her, and knowing these bits about her built this character up in my head. But the parts I learned that I did know to be true, like how she treated my siblings once my father gained custody of them didn’t help. She’d walk in on them in the shower. Once my father made one of my sisters wear the same clothes to school for an entire week, no washing them allowed. She’d shove past them on the stairs and make comments about their bodies and weight. My experiences personally were no better. She didn’t make comments to me, but she walked into each room as though she had the right to be there, but I reminded myself she was just the girlfriend. Not the step-mother. I owed her nothing. My attempts over the years to make peace with my father didn’t work, by the time she came along, I’d run out of f*cks to give. Not when she treated my siblings like that. He had sociopathic tendencies, so I’d come to expect certain behavior from him, and the powerlessness that came along with that. I’d learn to bob and weave the best I could with the sh*t that he flung. But no one else was allowed. Especially not this lady.

She’d built up no connection with my younger siblings. Just more pain and suffering.

So we refused to let her come to the funeral. We’d given him everything else up until that point or at least had managed it the best that we could. We’d asked nothing of him. But this was where we finally said, no. Absolutely not.

I’d been torn down over the years. My body, my choices, my personhood was systematically destroyed by the churches my father took us to, the schools he enrolled us in, and how he treated us individually. The same thing had happened to my siblings. And I struggled for myself to accept my worth and maintain my boundaries. But by god, I would not struggle for Margaret. She’d been dehumanized and beaten, very possibly killed by her boyfriend or driven to take her own life. And I would not continue to allow her to be treated that way in death. It was the only power I had left.

We decided to hold our memorial at a church nearby and keep it secret as possible. We wanted Margaret’s friends there, but we didn’t know how to reach them or open it up without holding to the one boundary we put in place. So we did the best that we could.

And Schlep threw his tantrum. Then his own memorial. When we refused to go, that’s when he threatened to throw her ashes away.

Even up to that point, I’d hoped for him to change.

Even through him asking for the “executor of Margaret’s estate”, hoping to get her car, even through him sharing intimate details about her death to strangers in New York City who then broadcast it live on Facebook for the world to hear, even through him insisting on taking half her ashes, even through him wanting his girlfriend at a memorial where we needed to be left alone to grieve, even through all of that, I thought maybe he’d have a change of heart. There’d be some sort of grand gesture. We could repair and rebuild.

But him showing the extent of what he’d go through to get his way, to the point of threatening to throw his daughter’s ashes away, was finally what I needed to know.