On living with the guilt of a loved one being raped, a Q&A, translated…
Q: My Mother’s Deep, Dark Secret
I received an aging woman’s letter, said that her mother is already ninety-three years old, bedridden for long, knowing that she’s about to die, but, there was, that secret she’d kept, for a very long time, for seventy years, she’d never told anybody else because she was so very, afraid. And because of the news of the young female writer’s suicide, it’d, triggered her past experiences, and, all the angers, resentments, overflowed her, and she’d felt compelled, to tell it all to her children, so they will, help right what had happened with her children’s eldest sister.
Back then, the elderly woman’s eldest sister followed her coach to out of county to compete in a sporting event, was raped by a predatory coachb The coach was usually quite tough in training, and, how was a fifteen-year-old weakly adolescent girl supposed to fight him off? The very next day she came home, she’d cried and told her mother what happened. This mother who is forceful after hearing, became extremely furious! Although she was very forceful, never admitted to defeat, but from sixty years ago, the society had, demanded absolute chastity toward women, and, as a woman gets raped by a man, the woman was always at fault, and, they don’t have a place to get justice.
The elderly woman didn’t even have the stature to confront the predatory coach, didn’t even dare make a scene, can only beat on her own daughter, call her bad names, to release her own anxieties from her daughter being raped, she’d even blurted out, “You should be so ashamed that you should die!” And, on that very night, the daughter killed herself, leaving her mother with never-ending torture, pain, guilt, and regrets.
A My Advice:
Toward this, other than feeling the grief, I have, NO other opinions. It’d been seventy years since, and that elderly mother of over ninety, that huge wound inside of her, became like a volcano, ready, to erupt, filled with angers, resentment, and I can only hope, that as the elderly passes away, her anger and resentment can, die with her. And I wish, that justice will finally prevail, generation, by generation in our world.
So, this elderly woman is guilt-ridden, for causing her own daughter to commit suicide, and that, was her primary issue, and, she reacted the only way she knew how, after all, back during the era, people are used to blaming the victims, and, these sorts of things are hush-hush, it’s just, that it must’ve been trying, for the elderly woman, to carry the facts of what happened to her daughter all this way, and, maybe, had she shown a little MORE support to her own daughter, she may NOT have killed herself, who knows???