Dr. Candace Nadine Breen

Chapter I

What a frigid day it was on February 27, 2001, the day of my father’s wake. I choked back tears as I sang “Amazing Grace” in front of my father’s coffin. How pale and non-threatening he looked. The fiery eyes were now closed and gone forever. I was suddenly lost in memories of childhood. I could see him ranting and raving, beating my little brother until he cried or was scarred. I recalled the many nights my father would creep into my bedroom and would force me to have sex with him. I remember the time I slapped him because I was tired of being “nasty.”

It was because of him that I was filled with enough rage to cause five world wars.

How I used to hate him. Yes, hate. Lying there in his coffin, he was helpless. Never again would he hurt anyone. NEVER. I didn’t even know why I was shedding tears for the man who helped to mentally destroy my adulthood. It was because of him that I had low self-esteem and had trouble with men. Why was I crying for that bastard? I was crying because I felt sorry for him, really.

I felt sorry because he was a person who spent his entire life hurting other people because he had been hurt. I cried because he had hurt so many people who had to live with the pain and large therapy bills because of the pain and heartache he had inflicted. My tears were real. As a child, I used to fantasize rejoicing over his death but on this particular day that was not the case at all. Years later, I learned from reading a Joyce Meyer book that “hurting people hurt other people.” Never had it occurred to me that my father was a man who suffered numerous years of pain and was angry at the world for his situation…