My father, Harry was an enigma. He wove fantasy into the reality of his life to the extreme that he no longer could separate the truth from the lies. I did not even know his true name until he died. It was Henry- not the Harry that he assumed, and he had two birthdays. One was his actual birth date, the other the date of a lost sister's birth. I wonder if he ever knew where the wrong date came from? He claimed not to know it himself until the Army obtained a security clearance for him during WWII.

It was awful growing up with a parent who fabricated vast parts of his life. Where does a child's sense of trust and security come from when one has to take everything a parent says with a grain of salt? The only part of his life I can be relatively certain of is after he was 45 years old when he married my mother. He told me he was an orphan who had no siblings and no family. All we knew was that he grew up in Kentucky.

Some years ago my sister and I went on a quest for the truth about Harry. What we learned stunned us to the core. Dad grew up with secrets. I have no doubt that some of these secrets he was never told "for his own good". His mother was murdered at the age of nineteen by a lover in a hotel room in Cincinnati, Ohio. The lover then committed suicide and their bodies were found by the hotel staff the next day. She told him that she would not leave her husband and children and go with him to St. Louis, MO. That we know from his seven page suicide letter. In the early 1900's, this was scandalous beyond belief, and it had to be awful for Dad's family when the Cincinnati Inquire followed this story for days.

We also learned that he had cousins and aunts and uncles living in the Greater Cincinnati area which includes northern Kentucky, and that he had abruptly disappeared from their lives a few years after he married my mother. One of his cousins searched years for him and was glad to hear from Harry's daughters. Even this cousin did not know how Harry's mother had died until he took this same journey down the genealogy trail.

Harry sexually abused his daughters and at least one cousin. Today, he would be labeled a sexual predator and I think he needed this 'warning labeled' attached to him. While he was kind and gentle, he had some awful inner need to prey upon children. I wonder what fantasy he was living out? I reported my father when I was 12 years old, and because he was so widely loved and admired, it was hard for the people who knew him to believe me. He confessed and was sentenced.

Dad married a few years after his release. He and his wife had a daughter, and surprise... he abused her too! His wife had the same sense of disbelief and was sure that this was something I had 'put into my sister's head'.

I had a relationship with my father until he died. I remember one of our conversations before he died. He talked about the always unfulfilled need to feel loved, and he was never able to fully accept responsibility for what he had done to me and to others.

How does a man's wiring become so crossed? Needless to say, I spent a lifetime overcoming the damage that he did to me.