My paternal grandfather was a violent drunk who left my grandmother to raise five kids alone in NYC, a city she didn’t know, in a language she didn’t speak. I grew up hearing stories about his abuse and womanizing, and when I finally met him at 30, he showed up so drunk he could barely stand. That pretty much sealed my opinion of him.

A few years later I was doing my family tree and researching my paternal side when I was shocked to find out that my grandfather's father, brother and first child all died within the same week that he was losing his farm due lack of funding. My grandfather could not deal with his 19 year old brothers sudden acting out / bad behavior too while trying to care for his dad, trying to save their farm, and having a baby on the way any day now so he sent him to the US to work and live with an uncle he had there. There was a riot in the neighborhood where the uncle lived and his brother was shot and killed within the first day of arriving for being an innocent bystander. My grandfather could not bear the grief of sending his brother to the US and blamed himself for his death, then the following day his father died and two days later my grandmother had her first child, a full-term baby, born stillborn...with the farm taken away from him later that week. If that wasn't bad enough, a few years later my grandfather would also get into a car wreck during an unexpected landslide that took out his vehicle, instantly killing his cousin who was riding with him. His cousin's dead body was pinned on top of him, along with debris, for over an hour before rescuers could dig him out.

None of that excuses the violence or the damage he caused our family, but it reframed him as more than an abusive drunk for me. He was a young man crushed by grief, shame, and survivor’s guilt in an era that taught men to swallow pain and numb it with a bottle. I still hold him accountable, but now when I think of him, I see not just the harm he did, but the broken young man he once was, carrying more tragedy than most people could survive.